Subject: Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#25663: verify macro in system.h incorrectly expects 8 byte long for 64-bit builds on Windows/Visual Studio

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:45:36 -0800

Kees Dekker wrote:
> Line numbers beyond 2^32 are also IMO hypothetical...

It's 2**31, and we don't want arbitrary limits like that in GNU code. It's easy 
to generate line numbers larger than that nowadays. Here's a contrived example:

$ rm -f big
$ truncate --size 10TiB big
$ echo x >>big
$ ls -l big
-rw-r--r--. 1 eggert eggert 10995116277762 Feb 12 00:38 big
$ grep -zn x big
10995116277761:x

Although diff is not nearly as good as grep with large files (that 'grep' 
command consumes only 4 ms real time on my old office desktop), diff shouldn't 
purposely have problems in that area.

You should be able to avoid the problem by compiling with Cygwin.