How can Powershell on Windows 7 diff two files?

Question

Can Powershell on Windows 7 diff two files on the hard drive?

Sometimes a text compare is helpful, but otherwise just telling whether a file is identical to another file is helpful. thanks.

Update:

on UNIX, it is

diff file1.dat file2.dat

On Powershell, if I create file1.txt, containing the content "hello" and copy this file to file2.txt, and type

diff file1.txt file2.txt

the result is

InputObject                                                 SideIndicator
-----------                                                 -------------
file2.txt                                                   =>
file1.txt                                                   <=

if I change the content of file2.txt to "hello world" and diff again, the result of diff'ing is the same.

Answer 1

Edit: Apparently there is a built in alias so this works too:

diff $(Get-Content C:\file1.txt) $(Get-Content C:\file2.txt)

You can do this:

Compare-Object $(Get-Content c:\file1.txt) $(Get-Content c:\file2.txt)

This is some sample output:

InputObject                             SideIndicator
-----------                             -------------
This is a line in file 2                =>
This is a line in file 1                <=

You can also do -excludeDifferent to only show the lines that are the same or -includeEqual to include the lines that are the same.