On 2021-06-30 11:38:21+0200, Alan Blotz <work@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Thank you for filling out a Git bug report! > Please answer the following questions to help us understand your issue. > > What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue) > > mkdir broken-diff > cd broken-diff > git init > mkdir dir1 > mkdir dir2 > touch dir1/orig > cd dir2/ > ln -s ../dir1/orig sym > cd .. > git add dir* > git ci -m "init" > git checkout -b b > git rm dir2/sym > git ci -m "remove" > git difftool -d master HEAD > > What did you expect to happen? (Expected behavior) > > git difftool shall compare both branches. > > What happened instead? (Actual behavior) > > git difftool prints an error: > > fatal: could not open '/tmp/git-difftool.l4UM7e/left/dir2/sym' for writing: No such file or directory It looks like this behaviour was there from the time difftool was re-written in C in 03831ef7b5, (difftool: implement the functionality in the builtin, 2017-01-19). The perl version didn't have this problem. The perl version create a file in place of that symlink and write the symlink's target into that file. The C version tries to write (and follow?) the symlink. This hack can fix the problem but I'm not sure it's correct: ----8<--- diff --git a/builtin/difftool.c b/builtin/difftool.c index 2115e548a5..737ebb5b1a 100644 --- a/builtin/difftool.c +++ b/builtin/difftool.c @@ -492,12 +492,14 @@ static int run_dir_diff(const char *extcmd, int symlinks, const char *prefix, if (*entry->left) { add_path(&ldir, ldir_len, entry->path); ensure_leading_directories(ldir.buf); - write_file(ldir.buf, "%s", entry->left); + unlink(ldir.buf); + write_file_buf(ldir.buf, entry->left, strlen(entry->left)); } if (*entry->right) { add_path(&rdir, rdir_len, entry->path); ensure_leading_directories(rdir.buf); - write_file(rdir.buf, "%s", entry->right); + unlink(rdir.buf); + write_file_buf(rdir.buf, entry->right, strlen(entry->right)); } } ---->8----- +Cc: Dscho, who wrote the C version. -- Danh