id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
5639	diffutils-3.11	Bruce Dubbs	lfs-book	"New minor version.

Noteworthy changes in release 3.11 (2025-02-02) [stable]

Improvements

  Programs now quote file names more consistently in diagnostics.
  For example; ""cmp 'none of' /etc/passwd"" now might output
  ""cmp: EOF on ‘none of’ which is empty"" instead of outputting
  ""cmp: EOF on none of which is empty"".  In diagnostic messages
  that traditionally omit quotes and where backward compatibility
  seems to be important, programs continue to omit quotes unless
  a file name contains shell metacharacters, in which case programs
  use shell quoting.  For example, although diff continues to output
  ""Only in a: b"" as before for most file names, it now outputs
  ""Only in 'a: b': 'c: d'"" instead of ""Only in a: b: c: d"" because the
  file names 'a: b' and 'c: d' contain spaces.  For compatibility
  with previous practice, diff -c and -u headers continue to quote for
  C rather than for the shell.

  diff now outputs more information when symbolic links differ, e.g.,
  ""Symbolic links ‘d/f’ -> ‘a’ and ‘e/f’ -> ‘b’ differ"", not just
  ""Symbolic links d/f and e/f differ"".  Special files too, e.g.,
  ""Character special files ‘d/f’ (1, 3) and ‘e/f’ (5, 0) differ"", not
  ""File d/f is a character special file while file e/f is a character
  special file"".

  diff's --ignore-case (-i) and --ignore-file-name-case options now
  support multi-byte characters.  For example, they treat Greek
  capital Δ like small δ when input uses UTF-8.

  diff now supports multi-byte characters when treating white space.
  In options like --expand-tabs (-t), --ignore-space-change (-b) and
  --ignore-tab-expansion (-E), diff now recognizes non-ASCII space
  characters and counts columns for non-ASCII characters.

Bug fixes

  cmp -bl no longer omits ""M-"" from bytes with the high bit set in
  single-byte locales like en_US.iso8859-1.  This fix causes the
  behavior to be locale independent, and to be the same as the
  longstanding behavior in the C locale and in locales using UTF-8.
  [bug introduced in 2.9]

  cmp -i N and -n N no longer fail merely because N is enormous.
  [bug present since ""the beginning""]

  cmp -s no longer mishandles /proc files, for which the Linux kernel
  reports a zero size even when nonempty.  For example, the following
  shell command now outputs nothing, as it should:
{{{
  cp /proc/cmdline t; cmp -s /proc/cmdline t || echo files differ
}}}
  [bug present since ""the beginning""]

  diff -E no longer mishandles some input lines containing '\a', '\b',
  '\f', '\r', '\v', or '\0'.
  [bug present since 2.8]

  diff -ly no longer mishandles non-ASCII input.
  [introduced in 2.9]

  diff - A/B now works correctly when standard input is a directory,
  by reading a file named B in that directory.
  [bug present since ""the beginning""]

  diff no longer suffers from race conditions in some cases
  when comparing files in a mutating file system.
  [bug present since ""the beginning""]

"	enhancement	closed	normal	12.3	Book	git	normal	fixed