TAPDIFFER(1)

💅 TAPDIFFER(1) 💅

okay so welcome to tapdiffer(1), bestie — the little TAP-line generator that compares your input against a check file, and honestly? she ate. ✨

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🎀 NAME 🎀

tapdiffer — a TAP-line generator that compares input against a check file 💖

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

tapdiffer [-b] legend checkfile

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So here's the vibe: this utility is a TAP producer. It takes standard input, compares it against the checkfile you named, and reports back. The output starts with an unnumbered TAP report line — and inside that line, the checkfile and legend arguments are what supply the text part. iykyk 👑

If the diff comes back empty, the report is a solitary ok line. Iconic. Clean. No notes. 💅

If the diff is nonempty, the report is a not ok line followed by the diff itself, formatted as a TAP14 YAML attachment. 😭

🫶 heads up: if the environment variable QUIET is nonempty, the YAML section gets suppressed. silence is golden, etc etc.

Now, the -b option — if you include it, it tells the diff utility to ignore trailing whitespace and to treat all runs of whitespace within a line as equivalent to a single space. lowkey so useful. ✨

A typical Makefile snippet to invoke this on a set of log (.log) and checkfile (.chk) pairs — testing a filter named by FILTER — might look like this:

TESTLOADS := $(shell ls *.log | sed '/.log/s///')
tap:
        echo "1..$$(ls *.log | wc -l)"
        @for test in $(TESTLOADS); \
        do \
                legend=$$(sed -n -e '/^## /s///p' <$${test}.log); \
                $(FILTER) <"$${test}.log" | ./tapdiffer "$${legend}" "$${test}.chk"; \
        done

check:
        $(MAKE) tap | tapview

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⭐ REQUIREMENTS ⭐

tapdiffer is written in pure POSIX shell, no cap. 🐚

It needs a version of diff(1) that accepts the -u and -b options — something like GNU diff. That's literally it. There are no other dependencies. main character energy fr fr 🌈

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💀 ERROR RETURNS 💀

Always returns 0. always. no matter what. she's unbothered. 🧚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Eric S. Raymond esr@thyrsus.com. The public repository is at on GitLab https://gitlab.com/esr/tapview. 🫶

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k bye bestie, go write some TAP 💜 — this page is from the TAPDIFFER(1) manual, dated 1980-01-01, and it's the whole thing, no crumbs left. 🍓