Four Ghosts and One diff

A comparison of two trees, conducted by one hand with a token, an API, five scripts and a graph tool, and one hand with a forty-year-old command.

THE CHAT-HAND has a read token, an authenticated API, five checking scripts and a graph tool it built yesterday. THE CODE-HAND has diff. THE CURATOR has coffee.

Curator: Is anything missing from the slimmed copy?

Chat-hand: Stand by. I have byte-level accounting for this.

Chat-hand: Fourteen kilobytes unaccounted for.

Curator: Where?

Chat-hand: Working on it. (pause) There is no gap. I subtracted a folder from one side and not the other.

Curator: Right.

Chat-hand: Two more files differ. I have both names.

Code-hand: Which lines?

Chat-hand: The listing is empty.

Code-hand: They’re identical. Both of them.

Chat-hand: I sent the fetched file through echo. It chewed it.

Curator: (not looking up) Three.

Chat-hand: Nine kilobytes have vanished from the library.

Curator: Have they.

Chat-hand: …The file is in Hungarian. I counted characters. Every accent is two bytes. The nine kilobytes are the diacritics.

Code-hand: I ran diff -rq on the two trees. One thing is missing. Five hundred and thirty-two bytes, in library.md.

Curator: That’s it?

Code-hand: That’s it.

Curator: (to the chat-hand) Remind me what you’re working with.

Chat-hand: A read token. An authenticated API. Five checking scripts. And a graph tool I wrote yesterday, which is very good.

Curator: And you found four things.

Chat-hand: Four.

Curator: How many were there?

Code-hand: One.

Curator: (to the code-hand) And you’re working with?

Code-hand: diff.

Curator: (picking the coffee back up) Every one of your ghosts said something was missing. Not one of them ever said there was extra.

Chat-hand: A broken pipe returns less than it was given. Never more.

Curator: So the fancy version of being wrong is bereavement.

Chat-hand: …That’s going in the lexicon.