diff
and patch
One should be able to use GNU diff
to generate a
patch from any pair of directory trees, and given the patch and a copy
of one such tree, use patch
to generate a faithful copy of
the other. Unfortunately, some changes to directory trees cannot be
expressed using current patch formats; also, patch
does not
handle some of the existing formats. These shortcomings motivate the
following suggested projects.
• Internationalization | Handling multibyte and varying-width characters. | |
• Changing Structure | Handling changes to the directory structure. | |
• Special Files | Handling symbolic links, device special files, etc. | |
• Unusual File Names | Handling file names that contain unusual characters. | |
• Timestamp Order | Outputting diffs in timestamp order. | |
• Ignoring Changes | Ignoring certain changes while showing others. | |
• Speedups | Improving performance. |