Questions tagged [diff]
diff is a shell command to find differences between two files. It is common on all *nix based systems
294
questions
476
votes
18
answers
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How do I compare binary files in Linux?
I need to compare two binary files and get the output in the form
<fileoffset-hex> <file1-byte-hex> <file2-byte-hex>
for every different byte. So if file1.bin is
00 90 00 11
in ...
113
votes
2
answers
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Ignore .svn when doing `diff -r`
diff has an option --recursive (-r) to do a comparison between two directories (the files inside them). Is there a way to make diff ignore certain sub-directories (eg: .svn)?
$ diff -r src1/ src2/
110
votes
10
answers
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How can I diff two XML files?
On Linux, how could I generate a diff between two XML files?
Ideally, I would like to be able configure it to some things strict, or loosen some things, like whitespace, or attribute order.
I'll ...
83
votes
6
answers
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How can I diff binary files in git?
In order to diff binary files in git, I assume I need to set up a difftool.
What difftools work? How do you put the parameters in?
67
votes
13
answers
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Linux: Compare Directory Structure Without Comparing Files
What is the best and simplest way to compare two directory structures without actually comparing the data in files? This works fine:
diff -qr dir1 dir2_
But it's really slow because it's comparing ...
61
votes
7
answers
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How to print files that would have been changed using rsync?
Is there a way to get rsync to print the full filepaths to all files that are different without actually transferring any files?
Alternatively, I need a way to diff the files across two trees (over ...
57
votes
4
answers
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vimdiff: Jump to next difference inside line?
vimdiff is very handy for comparing files. However, I often use it on files with long lines and relatively few differences inside the lines.
vimdiff will correctly highlight differences inside a line ...
56
votes
1
answer
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diff directories, excluding one folder inside
I think I have two directories with the same content, but I want to check it.
Also, I want to exclude a folder that is inside both directories.
How can I do it?
54
votes
7
answers
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How can I enable colored output for OSX diff?
I need to diff two files (not two versions of the same file, they are however tracked by git, but that is unrelated) and I would like some colored output, how can I achieve that?
$ diff file_1 file_2
...
44
votes
6
answers
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How to diff large files on Linux
I'm getting a diff: memory exhausted error when trying to diff two 27 GB files that are largely similar on a Linux box with CentOS 5 and 4 GB of RAM. This is a known problem, it seems.
I would expect ...
42
votes
3
answers
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Listing lines from just one file in DIFF
I would like to get (GNU)DIFF to printout only lines that are different in one file.
So given
==> diffa.txt <==
line1
line2 - in a only
line3
line4 changed
line5
==&...
42
votes
4
answers
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Using diff on a long one line file
I have a file that has only one line. Its size is about 20,000 bytes.
The file has been modified, and I wanted to know where.
I thought using diff, but it shows me the complete line, because it ...
41
votes
5
answers
73k
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How do I do a binary diff on two identically sized files under Linux?
I have two identically sized files, and I need to do a binary diff to check whether they're the same.
I'm currently runnnig diff file1.img file2.img but it's taking quite a while to process my 4 ...
39
votes
4
answers
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How to diff file names in two directories (without writing to intermediate files)?
I am trying to do something along the lines of:
diff `ls -1a ./dir1` `ls -1a ./dir2`
But that doesn't work for obvious reasons. Is there a better way of achieving this (in 1 line), than this?
ls -...
38
votes
11
answers
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How can I compare big files under Windows? [closed]
I'd like to compare two files under Windows, each about 1Gb in size. I tried Total Commander and WinMerge, but both ended with Out of memory errors.
I'm running Vista Home Premium 64bit with 8GB of ...