Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] difftool --dir-diff: symlink all files matching the working tree

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:

>> > +for f in file file2 sub/sub
>> > +do
>> > +	echo "$f"
>> > +	readlink "$2/$f"
>> > +done >actual
>> > +EOF
>> 
>> When you later want to enhance the test to check a combination of
>> difftool arguments where some paths are expected to become links and
>> others are expected to become real files, wouldn't this helper
>> become a bit awkward to use?  The element that expects a real file
>> could be an empty line to what corresponds to the output from
>> readlink, but still...
>> ...
>
> It looks like t3903 uses "ls -l" for this sort of test, perhaps
> something like this covers these cases better:
> ...
>     grep "-> $workdir/file" file.actual

Writing it without -e would confuse some implementations of grep
into thinking "-" introduces an option, realizing it does not
support the "->" option, and then barfing ;-)

What I had in mind was more along the lines of...

	for f
        do
        	echo "$f"
                readlink "$2/$f" || echo "# not a link $f"
	done

so that your "expect" list can become

	file
        $(pwd)/realdir/file
        modifiedone.txt
        # not a link modifiedone.txt

In any case, this "say blank if you expect a non symlink" is not an
urgent issue that needs to be fixed or anything like that, so let's
queue the v2 for now and see what happens.

Thanks.