Home/ Questions/Q 6644669
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T00:11:39+00:00

I would like to generate diffs for the sake of doing incremental backups of

  • 0

I would like to generate diffs for the sake of doing incremental backups of an sql database.

Using the standard unix ‘diff’ tool generates unnecessarily large files, since they include the full text of deleted lines. I only need support to be able to patch in one direction (to generate the current db dump from the full dump and an incremental patch).

How would I go about doing this? I have tried so far using diff -e and patch -e, but it doesn’t seem to be working correctly, as the resulting file is corrupt (possibly an issue with the ‘ed’ tool used in cygwin)

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    back in the old days, before Vim, there used to be a line-oriented UNIX editor called ‘ed’ ..

    diff has an option built in ( -e option ) , with which you can create an edit script from the diff.

    Check here: and look for the section “Edit Script”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff

    http://docs.freebsd.org/info/diff/diff.info.ed_Scripts.html

    here’s an example:

    http://www.araxis.com/merge/topic_diff_report_editscript.html

    another way to do this is to create a patch file (see ‘man patch’)

    • 0