Description of problem:

'diff FILE... DIR' does not work with more than one element in 'FILE...' (and the same holds for 'diff DIR FILE...'). In other words diff refuses to take more than two operands.

Both 'diff --help' and the man page do allow more than two operands:

diff [OPTION]... FILES
[...]
FILES are 'FILE1 FILE2' or 'DIR1 DIR2' or 'DIR FILE...' or 'FILE... DIR'.
[...]

Note however that the description in the POSIX man page (man-pages-3.51-2.fc19.noarch) does not allow for more than two operands. So a quick fix may be to just change the help message and the man page (and then diff would probably remain POSIX-compatible).


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

diffutils-3.3-4.fc19.x86_64


How reproducible:

100%


Steps to Reproduce:

touch a b
mkdir -p dir
echo "A" > dir/a
echo "B" > dir/b
diff a b dir/


Actual results:

diff: extra operand 'dir/'
diff: Try 'diff --help' for more information.


Expected results:

diff ./a dir/a
0a1
> A
diff ./b dir/b
0a1
> B


Additional info:

Not a diff bug if considering the specification in the POSIX man page.
But in that case, 'diff --help' and 'man 1 diff' need updating.