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Questions tagged [diff]

diff - Command-line tool to display the differences between two files, or each corresponding file in two directories.

545 questions
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3 answers

Recursively compare two directories with diff -r without output on broken links

I am using diff -r a b to recursively compare directories a and b. It often happens though that there are some broken links (the same broken links in both a and b directories and pointing to the same, non-existing targets). diff then outputs error…
Marcus Junius Brutus
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1 answer

How does "diff --exclude" work?

I'm trying to use diff to compare two directory trees while ignoring certain sub-directories, but I cannot get it to work. This is what my file structure looks like: temp/ |-- d1/ | |-- f1.txt | `-- ignoreme/ | `-- f2.txt `-- d2/ |--…
d512
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48
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7 answers

diff reports two files differ, although they are the same!

I have two files which look identical to me (including trailing whitespaces and newlines) but diff still says they differ. Even when I do a diff -y side by side comparison the lines look exactly the same. The output from diff is the whole 2…
DewinDell
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31
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4 answers

Result of diff two files with switched lines says missing the same line twice

I am trying to understand the linux diff command on two files whose lines are just permutation of each other but not able to grok the output that it generates. Consider the three commands below: [myPrompt]$ cat file1 apples oranges [myPrompt]$ cat…
Geek
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30
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2 answers

diff - output line-numbers

I want to use cli tool for file comparison and need line-number before output line with which help I could jump to line difference, because I use tool which understands where to jump, if the line begins like this :line-number: regular line…
zetah
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29
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5 answers

Compare two zip files for differences

diff command compares to see any difference betwenn two files. Can the same be used to compare two zip files, i.e if there is any difference in data ,like counts etc in individual files in the zipped files?
UnixPhile
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23
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1 answer

What effect does the "-d" option have with diff?

The diff implementation on OpenBSD has a non-standard -d option with the following documentation: -d Try very hard to produce a diff as small as possible. This may consume a lot of processing power and memory when processing …
Kusalananda
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14
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3 answers

diff reports the same line as different in 2 files

I have 2 files containing a list of songs. hdsongs.txt and sdsongs.txt I wrote a simple script to list all songs and output to text files, to then run a diff against. It works fine for the most part, but the actual diff command in the script is…
user1718443
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5 answers

Diff head of files

I have two files. One file, I suspect, is a subset of the other. Is there a way to diff the files to identify (in a succinct manner) where in the first file the second file fits?
Richard
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10
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3 answers

Side by side diff of large files

I have two ~1 GB files that I want to do a side by side diff of. Solutions I have tried: diff - Works quickly but doesn't output side-by-side. diff -y or sdiff - This outputs side-by-side but it outputs the entire file - not just the changes, so…
Timmmm
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10
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2 answers

Diff: only compare if file exists, not contents

I want to use Diff only to check if files and directories exist the same in two locations but NOT compare the contents of the files themselves, because that's all I need and a regular Diff just takes too long for the amount of data. How would I go…
morph
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10
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2 answers

How to show names of files being compared?

I used diff --from-file to compare my Riak dev1 config to the three others. diff --from-file ~/riak/dev/dev1/etc/app.config \ ~/riak/dev/dev2/etc/app.config \ ~/riak/dev/dev3/etc/app.config \ ~/riak/dev/dev4/etc/app.config It shows the configs…
Iain Samuel McLean Elder
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9
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2 answers

What does -u of diff really do?

Looks like -u can take an extra number argument, but I don't quiet get the manual, It says, -u, -U NUM, --unified[=NUM] output NUM (default 3) lines of unified context Someone name an example please? I couldn't find a working one.
daisy
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9
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3 answers

What does an exclamation mark mean in diff output?

I have an assignment for school. One part of it is to check a file for changes and write these changes to a log file. So far I've found the diff command which could be helpful in my opinion. Let's say I have two files with content like…
Denco
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9
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2 answers

What do the numbers in the "@@" line mean in output of diff?

Here is an example of Unix Shell program diff, from Version Control with Git, by Loeliger, 2ed: Let’s look at the diff in detail. In the header, the original file is denoted by - - - and the new file by +++. The @@ line provides line number…
Tim
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