Commands tagged diff

**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:

:q to quit

This commands will make it easier to select only common items between two files being compared. If your lines start with things other than lowercase a-z, adjust this Regex appropriately. Number of lines in the output has been set to no more than 10000, and should be adjusted as needed.

This command will open up the two files in FileMerge on OS X. You can also compare two directories.

NOTE: FileMerge is a part of the OS X Developer Tools, available on the install disc.

Simple way to achieve a colored SVN diff

It can be hard to spot differences in reformatted files, because of all the diff noise created by word wrapped lines. This command removes all the noise and performs a word-by-word diff. To ignore empty lines, add -B to the diff command. Also, if this is something you do often, you might want to check out the wdiff(1) program.

This uses Bash's "process substitution" feature to compare (using diff) the output of two different process pipelines.

populate the auth.hosts file with a list of IP addresses that are authorized to be in use and when you run this command it will return the addresses that are pingable and not in the authorized list.

Can be combined with the "Command line Twitter" command to tweet unauthorized access.