fucking bash
i am not clever enough to figure out how to send a list of 150 files through diff to see whether or not the versions in two different directories are the same
either something decides to separate them by spaces before diff gets them, or diff gets them with surrounding quotes and doesn't unquote them
seriously, who came up with this utter bullshit?!
in the end i echo'd the diff commands i needed to run into a temporary file and sent that to sh as stdin
i have no idea why that behaved differently from doing the diffs directly, but it did, and it solved the problem
FUUUUUUUCK bash
@arielmt (of course, some of the filenames had single quotes in them, which led to some unfortunate choking, but at least those were relatively obvious when i could see them in a file, rather than fighting the whole "when do quotes get expanded and when do they not" mechanism of bash
@mewsleah Ah, okay. Sorry for guessing wrong, and I'm still glad you prevailed. Also, it's good to know there are distros with non-bash 'sh' out there.
@arielmt no, unfortunately i was fighting bourne shell isms, and bash didn't offer anything to help. the script bypassed everything to do with replacement and just offered a big pile of diff -q calls, with two filenames in single quotes.
also, on my system (Void) sh is a symlink to dash