Posted: 20 March 2012
When upgrading Debian system packages I'm left with lots of files with
".dpkg-old" and ".dpkg-dist" extensions in /etc. These are all a
result of upgrades including newer config files, but being unable to
install the new file out of respect for my local changes.
Figuring out exactly what's changed with diff can be annoying because
often there are huge changes to the comments. While it is nice to have
new comments, the comment changes overwhelm all the actual config file
changes.
I've found that using grep -v '^#' to strip out the comments and then
diff the results is great for figuring out what really changed. And the
fancy bash (only?) "process substitution" syntax <( ... ) (see
stackoverflow)
lets you pipe the output from the two grep's into diff, without messing
around with temporary files. For example:
diff <( grep -v '^#' smartd.conf) <( grep -v '^#' smartd.conf.dpkg-dist)