Commands tagged diff

Outputs the number of different pixels.

2 params to increase tolerance:

* thumbnails size

* fuzz, the color distance tolerance

See http://en.positon.org/post/Compare-/-diff-between-two-images for more details.

Compare the ls -Rl output of two directories in meld (you can also use diff -y instead of meld).

The normal output of 'diff' is a wonderful thing. But just sometimes, you want something that is a little more... well... readable.

This is that command.

-d - (optional) find the minimal set of changes

-b - (optional) ignore changes in the amount of whitespace

-B - (optional) ignore changes that just insert or delete blank lines

-y - this is where the magic happens! Use the side-by-side output format.

-w $COLUMNS - more magic! Instead of using 80 columns, use the current width of the terminal.

Output of this command is the difference of recursive file lists in two directories (very quick!).

To view differences in content of files too, use the command submitted by mariusbutuc (very slow!):

If you have ever edited a locally checked out version of a file to tweak it for testing purposes, and came back to it over a weekend, you might have forgotten what you exactly changed. This command helps you see the differences between the the checked in SVN version, and the one you tweaked.

This will extract the differing CSS entries of two files. I've left the initial character (plus or space) in output to show the real differing line, remove the initial character to get a working CSS file. The output CSS file is usable by either adding it in a below the to original.css, or by only using the output but adding @import url("original.css"); in the beginning.

This is very useful for converting Wordpress theme copies into real Wordpress child themes.

Could exclude common lines within entries too, I guess, but that might not be worth the complexity.

Requires wdiff. Prints the word-by-word diff with the old version highlighted in red, and the new in green. Change the colors by altering 41m and 42m. 45m is more of a magenta and may be easier to read.

Diffs two xml files by formatting them first using xmllint and then invoking diff.

Usage: diffxml XMLFile1 XMLFile2

Maybe very limited in its applicability but could be of use at times.

Upload/download newer version of any file with less size and high speed.

To remake the new file use

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070408062023352

Description is moved to "Sample output" because the html sanitizer for commandlinefu breaks the examples..

M - current revision, N - older revision

This form is used in patches, svn, git etc. And I've created an alias for it:

alias diff='diff -Naur --strip-trailing-cr'

The latter option is especially useful, when somebody in team works in Windows; could be also used in commands like

**NOTE** Tekhne's alternative is much more succinct and its output conforms to the files actual contents rather than with white space removed

My command on the other hand uses bash process substitution (and "Minimal" Perl), instead of files, to first remove leading and trailing white space from lines, before diff'ing the streams. Very useful when differences in indentation, such as in programming source code files, may be irrelevant

on a dpkg managed system this PATTERN will help you generate .deb files from source AND remove all the dev libs you had to install. i hate cluttering up my machine with rouge packages and headers.

it would be pretty darn easy on rpm systems as well. i just dont have a rpm managed system to test on right now.

NOTE, you sharp ones will notice that it uninstalls the deb you just made! yeah, but the deb is still there to do with it what you want, like re install it. or you can just grep -v after the diff

Barely worth posting because it is so simple, but I use it literally all the time. I was always frustrated by the limitations that a non-gui environment imposes on diff'ing files. This fixes some of those limitations by colourising the output (you'll have to install colordiff, but it is just a wrapper for diff itself), using side-by-side mode for clearer presentation, and of course, the -W parameter, using tput to automatically insert you terminal width. Note that the double quotes aren't necessary if typed into terminal as-is. I included them for safety sake,

This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.

This will diff your local version of the file with the latest version in svn. I put this in a shell function like so: