FreeBSD® Unleashed

Using mergemaster to Check for Changed Configuration Files

There's only one step left to go: merging the /etc hierarchy (and other miscellaneous areas such as /var/log and /usr/share). As we discussed earlier, the make world steps don't touch /etc, in order to keep from stomping on heavily customized configurations. In earlier days, the only way to merge changes into /etc was to do it manually, a very painful and error-prone process. The mergemaster utility, a standard part of FreeBSD, makes this process a great deal simpler and safer.

There are a lot of safeguards built into mergemaster; it's a very safe tool to use. Nevertheless, there always exists the risk of damaging your configuration, so as a precaution, you should make a backup copy of ...