NAME

       singledelta - heuristic minimizer of interesting files

SYNOPSIS

       singledelta -test=test-script [options] [initial-file]

DESCRIPTION

       Delta assists you in minimizing "interesting" files subject to a test of their interestingness. A common
       such situation is when attempting to isolate a small failure-inducing substring of a large input that
       causes your program to exhibit a bug.

       You supply singledelta with

       • a test shell script which decides if its input file is "interesting" (test-script) and

       • an initial interesting input file (initial-file or standard input).

       Delta uses heuristics to find a sub-file of your input file that is still "interesting" according to your
       test.

       Delta has a notion of the granularity of the file: the smallest atomic elements of which the file is seen
       as a sequence. The default is the line granularity: in this mode, delta will attempt to delete entire
       lines, but will never try deleting a smaller element than that. You can filter a program through
       topformflat(1) to produce a file where the line-granularity only goes to a specified nesting depth (if
       your file is in a nested language).  multidelta(1) does this for you.

OPTIONS

       -test=test-script
           Use test-script as the test program. This option is mandatory.

           The test program accepts a single argument, the name of the candidate file to test. It is run within
           a directory containing only that file, and it can make temporary files/directories in that directory.
           It should return zero for a candidate that exhibits the desired property, and nonzero for one that
           does not.

       -suffix=suffix
           Set filename suffix to suffix. The default is ".c".

       -dump_input
           Dump the contents of the initial file after reading it.

       -cp_minimal=file
           Copy the minimal successful test to file.

       -granularity=line
           Use lines as the granularity. This is the default.

       -granularity=top_form
           Use C top-level forms as the granularity.  This currently only works with CIL output.

       -log=file
           Log main events to file.

       -quiet
           Do not produce any output.

       -verbose
           Produce more verbose output.

       -in_place
           Overwrite initial-file with inputs.

       -help
           Print out usage information.

NOTES

       The name singledelta is Debian-specific.  The upstream name of this program is simply delta.

SEE ALSO

       multidelta(1), topformflat(1)

       Delta Debugging project <http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/dd/>