smidiff(1)

💅 smidiff — check differences between a pair of SMI or SPPI modules

okay so real talk, this is the smidiff page from the SMI Tools manual, section 1. she's a whole vibe and she's about to tell you which of your MIBs changed in a way that's gonna break stuff. strap in bestie 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

smidiff [ -Vhsm ] [ -c file ] [ -l level ] [ -i error-pattern ] [ -p
module ] oldmodule newmodule

that's it. two modules, a handful of flags, and a whole lot of opinions about your diffs 🫶

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the smidiff program is literally the tool for checking differences between a pair of SMI MIB modules or SPPI PIB modules. like, e.g., you can use it to detect changes in updated MIB modules that can cause interoperability problems with existing implementations. and yes, SMIv1/v2 and SPPI style MIB/PIB modules are all supported. equal opportunity icon behavior 💅

ngl, one thing to flag: conformance statements are currently not checked. that's just how it is, no cap.

the messages describing the differences get written to the standard output channel, while error and warning messages generated by the parser get written to the standard error channel. two channels, two moods 😭

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -V, --version — Show the smidump version and exit. (yes bestie, it literally says smidump — that's the text, we don't fix it, we report it 💀)
• -h, --help — Show a help text and exit. classic.
• -s, --severity — Show the error severity in brackets before error messages. [3] energy.
• -m, --error-names — Show the error names in braces before error messages. slay, labels.
• *-c *file, --config=file — Read file instead of any other (global and user) configuration file. your config, your rules 👑
• *-p *module, --preload=module — Preload the module module before reading the main module(s). This may be helpful if an incomplete main module misses to import some definitions. it's giving backup bestie 🧚
• *-l *level, --level=level — Report errors and warnings up to the given severity level. See the smilint(1) manual page for a description of the error levels. the default error level is 3.
• *-i *prefix, --ignore=prefix — Ignore all errors that have a tag which matches prefix. not me ignoring my problems ✨

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🦋 the arguments 🦋

• oldmodule — The original module. the before picture 📸
• newmodule — The updated module. the glow-up (or the glow-down, we'll see)

okay this part is lowkey important: if a module argument represents a path name (identified by containing at least one dot or slash character), this is assumed to be the exact file to read. Otherwise, if a module is identified by its plain module name, it is searched according to libsmi internal rules. See smi_config(3) for more details. so like, dots and slashes = "this exact file", plain name = "go find her" 🔍

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

The libsmi(3) project is documented at http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/libsmi/. go read, iykyk 💜

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

• (C) 2001 T. Klie, TU Braunschweig, Germany <tklie@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
• (C) 2001 J. Schoenwaelder, TU Braunschweig, Germany <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
• and contributions by many other people. 🫶

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and that's the whole page!! this icon was brought to you by IBR, dated August 10, 2004 — yeah she's vintage but she still eats 💅✨ no cap, 2004 called and it's still serving. ok bye bestie, go diff some modules 💖