Show file permission differences

[Ambrevar]

I got bitten hard today by an assumption I made, namely that ztree would show file permission differences.

It's an important feature for a file comparison tool, I would love to see this implemented.

[fourier]

Thanks for reporting. I'll take a look on how to get file permissions in GNU Emacs; command-line diff tool which I use to compare files doesn't know about file permissions. Out of curiosity, what is the use-case for this feature? I never ever needed anything like this in my professional carrier.

[Ambrevar]

Indeed, regular diff tools don't do it. The only tools I know which do this are rsync (e.g. rsync -nirv --perms --size-only DIR1/ DIR2) and Beyond Compare (proprietary).

Use case? Well, file attributes contribute to what defines the files, don't they? Otherwise they would not be there. tar can store them, rsync can sync them, git preserves them, etc.

More specifically: I was working on product with a huge number of files. I had 2 versions, 1 was working, the other one was crashing. I couldn't figure out why since both file trees were identical according to ztree. Until I found out that some executables had had their x flag taken away at some point...

[fourier]

Hi @Ambrevar , please try the recent version, it will show files with different modes (+x/-x etc) os differences. It doesn't show though what are the differences (yet).

[fourier]

Forgot to mention: you have to add (setq ztree-diff-consider-file-permissions t) to your config in order for this feature to be active.

[Ambrevar]

Nice! Thanks for that one! Waiting for more visual details then :D

[Ambrevar]

I just tested and it works like a charm!

[fourier]

Great. I'll close this issue for now then and open #57 as an enhancement.