RFI: mtree -n option

[Malcolm Herbert <mjch%mjch.net@localhost>]

(Apologies if this is not the correct forum - I'm not sure who is 
responsible for mtree)

At the moment, if I merely want to see the differences between two
directory trees or compare to an mtree spec I can't tell mtree not to
make any modifications to it. I can tell it not to update permissions
and attributes with the -W flag, but mtree still insists on creating
missing directories.

For example, assuming the following directory trees:

  new
  new/blah
  new/foo/
  old
  old/bar/
  old/blah
  old/foo/empty

old/blah and new/blah differ in their content, so MD5 checks will fail

If I want to compare these, I'd run the following:

  tiu[/data/scratch] 134v>: mtree -c -p old -K md5 | mtree -Wu -p new -K md5
  blah:   md5 (0x5149d403009a139c7e085405ef762e1a, 
0x3d709e89c8ce201e3c928eb917989aef)
  missing: ./bar (created)
  missing: ./foo/empty

... but then mtree will have created new/bar for me, as above.

So, can we add a "don't to anything" option to mtree?  -n appears to be
available and would match expected behaviour for other tools ...

Regards,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                This brain intentionally
mjch%mjch.net@localhost                                                left 
blank