Re: Problem with vimdiff and file name resolution

Gary Johnson wrote:

> > > On one of the Linux machines on which I run Vim we run a backup
> > > program which creates hourly and nightly backups of each user's home
> > > directory in ~/.snapshot. The problem is that when I try to view
> > > the differences between a file and its backup copy using vimdiff,
> > > vimdiff resolves both file names to the same file.
> > >
> > > For example, the following command,
> > >
> > > $ vimdiff -N -u NONE -i NONE .snapshot/nightly.0/.configfiles/profile.common .configfiles/profile.common
> > >
> > > creates two vertically-split windows, but both windows contain the
> > > same file, .snapshot/nightly.0/.configfiles/profile.common.
> > >
> > > I can view the differences by using just diff instead,
> > >
> > > $ diff .snapshot/nightly.0/.configfiles/profile.common .configfiles/profile.common
> > >
> > > and ls also shows them to be different files:
> > >
> > > $ ls -l .snapshot/nightly.0/.configfiles/profile.common .configfiles/profile.common
> > > -rwx------ 1 gary gary 3523 Jul 9 13:09 .configfiles/profile.common
> > > -rwx------ 1 gary gary 2992 Jul 7 10:07 .snapshot/nightly.0/.configfiles/profile.common
> > >
> > > This seems like a bug.
> > >
> > > I'm running 7.4.283 on Fedora 17 Linux.
> >
> > Did you check the inode numbers on the files? ls --inode.
> > Vim checks if files are the same, ignoring links, by comparing the inode
> > and devide number.
>
> I was going to try that before, but thought it unnecessary since the
> sizes and modification times were different. I tried it just now,
> changing nightly.0 to nightly.1 because the backups have rotated.
>
> $ ls -il .snapshot/nightly.1/.configfiles/profile.common .configfiles/profile.common
> 14988947 -rwx------ 1 gary gary 2269 Jul 9 15:00 .configfiles/profile.common
> 14988947 -rwx------ 1 gary gary 2992 Jul 7 10:07 .snapshot/nightly.1/.configfiles/profile.common
>
> Sure enough, the inode numbers are the same! I then tried to find
> out something about the file systems to which those directories
> belong, but I don't understand the results.
>
> $ df -h .configfiles
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> fserver1b:/vol/users/gary/ 3.0T 1.6T 1.5T 53% /home/gary
>
> $ df -h .snapshot/nightly.1/.configfiles
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> fserver1b:/vol/users/gary/ 538G 270G 269G 51% /home/gary
>
> The file systems have the same names, but different stats.
>
> I've asked one of our IT guys to explain that to me.
>
> It remains, though, that that "feature" of vimdiff is still causing
> me difficulty. I haven't looked yet at the code that Christian
> pointed me to, but it seems that if vimdiff is going to try for some
> sort of optimization by checking inode numbers, it ought to check
> file systems as well.

It's not vimdiff, if you try to edit both files in any other way you
most likely run into the same problem, that Vim thinks they are the same
file. And will load only the first one. This is to catch hard links.

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