How to increase the memory available to diff in cygwin 1.7?

Mon Oct 26 18:29:00 GMT 2009

Hm...I thought that discussion was actually about grep, but,
nonetheless, it does seem increasingly likely that this
is just a problem with diff.
Considering that I only want to know whether or not two files
differ, this should not require any significant memory usage.
(In other words, don't use mmap().)
I guess I'll just write my own recursive comparison program.
In theory I can just write it as if the platform were POSIX, right?
That'd be sweet, and make it a million times easier for me.
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Christopher Faylor
<cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:41:13AM -0400, Kenneth Chiu wrote:
>>I'm trying to diff two large directories, recursively, and
>>I'm getting this error:
>>>>    $ diff -rq B B2 >diff.out
>>    diff: memory exhausted
>>>>I looked at this URL
>>>>    http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-maxmem.html
>>>>but it seemed out-of-date.  There was no such key in the
>>registry, and the options to the regtool were different from
>>what the regtool man page says.
>>>>Any suggestions on how to get rid of the memory
>>exhaustion error?  Is there a new key path that I should
>>use for the heap_chunk_in_mb value?  Is it possible
>>that I'm simply bumping into a 2 GB limit for
>>32-bit processes?  (And if that is the case,
>>is there a recommended way to go to 64-bit?)
>> AFAIK, this is just a limitation of diff.  You can get the same
> error on linux.
>> This was discussed in some detail in this list a few months ago.
>> cgf
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