To share a configuration file between two computers, I emailed the file to myself via my gmail account. When I loaded the conf on the second computer, the program had trouble reading every line. Suspecting a problem with newline characters (dos vs unix style), I opened the file up in gvim. I didn't see any ^M's in there as I suspected. A 'set list' didn't show anything strange - just the text of the file with every line terminated by '$' as I expected. It looks perfectly fine. A cat of the file looks just as I'd expect it to.
Out of desperation, I moved the file out of the way and manually retyped the contents of the file in a split vim session (it's only about 20 lines). I ran a gvim -d on the two files, and that showed no differences.
I ran the program that uses the config file, and sure enough, it was now able to read the newly typed file just fine.
I md5sum'd the two files, and they do have different sums. I ran a diff on the original file and the newly typed file and it shows that every single line of the files are different. But I can't see any difference in the output.
So, I'm curious: what tool can I use to see the differences between these two files? gvim -d shows no differences, and diff shows that they are all different, but the output looks identical.
If I could attach the two files, I would.
file
on those two files, which tells you also some unusual line endlings. I would bet thatdiff -b
(ignores changes in whitespaces) reports also that the files are identical.