freebsd-dev/gnu/usr.bin/diff3/diff3.1
Nate Williams f8972f58e8 Fixed non-conflict errors that occur when changes made to the local files are
the same as the changes made in the repository.  This is often seen by
people with remote CVS trees that have applied their local patches to the
master site.  a 'cvs update' will show bogus conflicts.

Obtained from: CVS mailing list, Stig<stig@inse.com>

In diffutils 2.6 and 2.7, diff3 -A complains about identical overlapping
changes.  They're different from the ancestor but not from each other...
Why bother?  The patch below fixes this nonsense and preserves [B]ackwards
compatiblity with the -B flag (also --show-bogus-conflicts).

    Party on...
    Stig
1995-02-20 18:47:18 +00:00

211 lines
3.7 KiB
Groff

.TH DIFF3 1 "22sep1993" "GNU Tools" "GNU Tools"
.SH NAME
diff3 \- find differences between three files
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B diff3
[options] mine older yours
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.I diff3
command compares three files and outputs descriptions
of their differences.
The files to compare are
.IR mine ,
.IR older ,
and
.IR yours .
At most one of these three file names may be
.BR \- ,
which tells
.I diff3
to read the standard input for that file.
.SS Options
Below is a summary of all of the options that GNU
.I diff3
accepts. Multiple single letter options (unless they take an argument)
can be combined into a single command line argument.
.TP
.B \-a
Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they
do not appear to be text.
.TP
.B \-A
Incorporate all changes from
.I older
to
.I yours
into
.IR mine ,
surrounding all conflicts with bracket lines.
.TP
.B \-B
Old behavior of -A. Shows non-conflicts.
.TP
.B \-e
Generate an
.I ed
script that incorporates all the changes from
.I older
to
.I yours
into
.IR mine .
.TP
.B \-E
Like
.BR \-e ,
except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first
and third files.
With
.BR \-e ,
an overlapping change looks like this:
.sp
.nf
<<<<<<< \fImine\fP
lines from \fImine\fP
=======
lines from \fIyours\fP
>>>>>>> \fIyours\fP
.fi
.TP
.B \-\-ed
Generate an
.I ed
script that incorporates all the changes from
.I older
to
.I yours
into
.IR mine .
.TP
.B \-\-easy\-only
Like
.BR \-e ,
except output only the nonoverlapping changes.
.TP
.B \-i
Generate
.B w
and
.B q
commands at the end of the
.I ed
script for System V compatibility. This option must be combined with
one of the
.B \-AeExX3
options, and may not be combined with
.BR \-m .
.TP
.B \-\-initial\-tab
Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format.
This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal.
.TP
.BI "\-L " label
.ns
.TP
.BI \-\-label= label
Use the label
.I label
for the brackets output by the
.BR \-A ,
.B \-E
and
.B \-X
options. This option may be given up to three
times, one for each input file. The default labels are the names of
the input files. Thus
.B "diff3 \-L X \-L Y \-L Z \-m A B C"
acts like
.BR "diff3 \-m A B C ,
except that the output looks like it came from
files named
.BR X ,
.B Y
and
.B Z
rather than from files
named
.BR A ,
.B B
and
.BR C .
.TP
.B \-m
.br
.ns
.TP
.B \-\-merge
Apply the edit script to the first file and send the result to standard
output. Unlike piping the output from
.I diff3
to
.IR ed ,
this
works even for binary files and incomplete lines.
.B \-A
is assumed
if no edit script option is specified.
.TP
.B \-\-overlap\-only
Like
.BR \-e ,
except output only the overlapping changes.
.TP
.B \-\-show\-all
Incorporate all unmerged changes from
.I older
to
.I yours
into
.IR mine ,
surrounding all overlapping changes with bracket lines.
.TP
.B \-\-show\-overlap
Like
.BR \-e ,
except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first
and third files.
.TP
.B \-T
Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format.
This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal.
.TP
.B \-\-text
Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they
do not appear to be text.
.TP
.B \-v
.br
.ns
.TP
.B \-\-version
Output the version number of
.IR diff3 .
.TP
.B \-x
Like
.BR \-e ,
except output only the overlapping changes.
.TP
.B \-X
Like
.BR \-E ,
except output only the overlapping changes.
In other words, like
.BR \-x ,
except bracket changes as in
.BR \-E .
.TP
.B \-3
Like
.BR \-e ,
except output only the nonoverlapping changes.
.SH SEE ALSO
cmp(1), comm(1), diff(1), ed(1), patch(1), sdiff(1).
.SH DIAGNOSTICS
An exit status of 0 means
.I diff3
was successful, 1 means some
conflicts were found, and 2 means trouble.