On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 11:27:30AM +0000, vapnik spaknik via General Guile related discussions wrote:

[...]

> OK... I was being stupid.

We all are, most of us more often than not ;-)

>Another strange thing is that if I use the pipeline procedure to do the same thing, then I get an exit code of 1 >from the wc command, but it still returns the same result:

This is by design. Quote the "diff" man page:

  "Exit status is 0 if inputs are the same, 1 if different,
   2 if trouble."

That's probably so that you can do things in the shell like

  diff a b > /dev/null && echo "same" || echo "diff"

Cheers
-- t