Command Reference Guide
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STANDARD Printed by: Nora Chuang [nchuang] STANDARD
/build/1111/BRICK/man1/!!!intro.1
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d
diffmk(1) diffmk(1)
NAME
diffmk - mark changes between two different versions of a file
SYNOPSIS
diffmk prevfile currfile markfile
DESCRIPTION
diffmk compares the previous version of a file with the current version and creates a file that includes
nroff/troff ‘‘change mark’’ commands. prevfile is the name of the previous version of the file and
currfile is the name of the current version of the file. diffmk generates markfile which contains all the
lines of the currfile plus inserted formatter ‘‘change mark’’ (.mc) requests. When markfile is formatted,
changed or inserted text is shown by a | character at the right margin of each line. The position of deleted
text is shown by a single *.
If the characters | and * are inappropriate, a copy of diffmk can be edited to change them because
diffmk is a shell script.
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
International Code Set Support
Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported.
EXAMPLES
A typical command line for comparing two versions of an nroff/troff file and generating a file with the
changes marked is:
diffmk prevfile currfile markfile; nroff markfile | pr
diffmk
can also be used to produce listingsof C (or other) programs with changes marked. A typical com-
mand line for such use is:
diffmk prevfile.c currfile.c markfile.c; nroff macs markfile.c | pr
where the file macs contains:
.pl 1
.ll 77
.nf
.eo
The .ll request can specify a different line length, depending on the nature of the program being printed.
The .eo request is probably needed only for C programs.
WARNINGS
Aesthetic considerations may dictate manual adjustment of some output.
diffmk does not differentiate between changes in text and changes in formatter request coding. Thus, file
differences involving only formatting changes (such as replacing .sp with .sp 2 in a text source file) with
no change in actual text can produce change marks.
Although unlikely, certain combinations of formatting requests can cause change marks to either disappear
or to mark too much. Manual intervention may be required because the subtleties of various formatting
macro packages and preprocessors is beyond the scope of
diffmk. tbl cannot tolerate .mc commands in
its input (see tbl(1)), so any
.mc request that would appear inside a .TS range is silently deleted. The
script can be changed if this action is inappropriate, or
diffmk can be run on two files that have both been
run through the
tbl preprocessor before any comparisons are made.
diffmk uses diff, and thus has the same limitations on file size and performance that diff may
impose (see diff(1)). In particular the performance is nonlinear with the size of the file, and very large files
(well over 1000 lines) may take extremely long to process. Breaking the file into smaller pieces may be
advisable.
diffmk also uses the ed(1) editor. If the file is too large for ed, ed error messages may be embedded in
the file. Again, breaking the file into smaller pieces may be advisable.
SEE ALSO
diff(1), nroff(1).
Section 1−−182 − 1 − HP-UX Release 11i: December 2000
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