From: Craig A. Berry [craig.berry@metamorgs.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 9:00 PM To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com Subject: GNU patch 2.5.4 and diffutils 2.7 available for OpenVMS The utilities listed in the subject line are available for download at: and Thanks to Dan Sugalski for hosting these, and to Peter Prymmer and Bill Hobbs for help with testing. Mirroring elsewhere is encouraged; please announce here if you do so. Alpha executables are included in both archives, as well as source that should be buildable with DEC C 5.2 or later. Each archive contains a file readme.vms with further notes. This diff package is based on Richard Levitte's work of several years ago; in fact it's mostly a simplification and reduction of his changes, made possible (and necessary) by improvements in DEC C and the C RTL in recent years. Unfortunately his version (also of diffutils 2.7) will no longer compile with 5.2 or later compilers. He is of course not responsible for anything I've munged, but if you see anything clever in the source it's probably something I borrowed from him. For VMS folks unfamiliar with these Unixy utilities, GNU diff is an alternative to the VMS DIFFERENCES command. It's main advantage is that its output can be fed to patch, which will update a file from a set of differences. Yes, I know you can do this with DIFFERENCES/SLP and EDIT/SUM, but the GNU versions are cross-platform, use more human-readable patch files, plus patch does fuzzy matching in case the file you are updating doesn't exactly match the file the differences were taken from. Note: for the patch archive you may want to use unzip/update -- for some reason it was wanting to create one of the files twice when I tested it with unzip 5.32. The archives were created with zip 2.2. ____________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:craig.berry@metamorgs.com