On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 09:34:22PM +0000, vapnik spaknik wrote:
> Hi,
>     I'm trying to write some code to get the size of a diff of two files.
> If I run the following pipeline in my zsh shell:
> 
> > diff -ua /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2 | wc -c
> 
> it prints 215
> However when I run the following in guile:
> 
> guile> (system "diff -ua /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2 | wc -c")

Have you actually tried to compare both results?

There are a couple of things which could make a difference. The
one which first comes to mind would be different environments
(PATH, language settings in LANG, LC_).

One thing you might want to try (to keep most of your experimental
setup) would be:

  diff -ua /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2 > /tmp/delta1

and then

  guile> (system "diff -ua /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2 > /tmp/delta2")

...and then diff the diffs.

Cheers
-- t