diff shows a file that does not exist

Question

I created a backup on an external hard disc. Then I created another backup and copied all files to another external hard disc. I wanted to check with diff if everything was copied:

user@user:/media/user$ diff -r backup backup1
Nur in backup1/home/user: file.xls.
Nur in backup1/home/user: file.zip.

("nur" is German for "only".)

The diff shows two files that are not existing:

user@user:/media/user$ file backup1/home/user/file.xls.
backup1/home/user/file.xls.: cannot open backup1/home/user/file.xls. (No such file or directory)
user@user:/media/user$ file backup1/home/user/file.zip.
backup1/home/user/file.zip.: cannot open backup1/home/user/file.zip. (No such file or directory)

How does it come that diff shows these two files, and how can I fix the output of diff? The filesystem is LUKS on both external hard drives.

Answer 1

The output of diff -r with a German locale adds a . to the file.
Files backup1/home/user/file.xls and backup1/home/user/file.zip should exist.

Example:

$ mkdir dir1 dir2
$ touch dir1/foo
$ LANG=de_DE.UTF8 diff -r dir1 dir2
Nur in dir1: foo.
$ diff -r dir1 dir2
Only in dir1: foo

• rmac38: Oh i did not thought about that because i got many files with an ending dot... Thank you!
• Scott - Слава Україні: What a weird feature! Great discovery!
• user313992: You should submit a bug report about this. Looking through the po directory of diffutils, only the DE translation does append a period to the filename. All european languages end sentences with a period, there's nothing that stringently German about it. In this case, they could just get rid of it like everybody else ;-)
• rmac38: I will do later. Some scripts could break with this dot and German locale. I was used to English locale, too.
• rmac38: I filled a bug but don't know if this is the right place. Bug number 1 seems not right ;) github.com/Distrotech/diffutils/issues/1 If there is a better place please tell me.