[kwlug-disc] excluding directories in diff

[Paul Nijjar]

Say I have two directory structures: 

/home/pnijjar/stuff/orig/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/orig/proj1/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/orig/proj1/images/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/orig/proj2/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/orig/proj2/images/

and

/home/pnijjar/stuff/new/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/new/proj1/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/new/proj1/images/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/new/proj2/
/home/pnijjar/stuff/new/proj2/images/

I want to make a unified diff of these, with the following conditions:

0. don't diff files in the proj2/images/ directory (but do diff in
proj1/images)

1. be able to run this same command configuration with files in
/home/bonzo (or /usr/local/bin/blah or whereever) without changing the
configuration file. 


Assuming I am in /home/pnijjar/stuff, I can run 

diff -Naur orig new 

and get a unified diff with all files. If I make an exclude file with
the contents 

--
*images*
--

and run it as 

diff -Naur --exclude-from=excludes orig new 

then I can get a diff with NONE of the images. What I can't do is
something like this


--
proj2/images/
--

and have it selectively exclude images. I have tried things like

.proj2/images
*proj2/images* 

and others, but I can't get anything to work. 

The diff documentation says that the syntax is shell pattern syntax,
as opposed to regexp syntax. So I guess I just don't understand shell
patterns well. 

I would be fine with using another kind of diff, provided that: 
  0. I can run it from the command line
  1. It produces human-readable output
  2. It has a corresponding patch utility

Any ideas? Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree hoping to match
prefixes with wildcards. But it seems that if I put any kind of slash
in the exclusion file then things break. 

- Paul