"Pavel M. Penev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >Can someone tell me a sensible reason for not having a 'diff' equivalent >for binary file?
There is "cmp", but it reports only the position of the first differing byte (if any). As for why not: * diff is helped a lot by the fact that the input is line-based text. And diff doesn't work very well if the lines are very short or there are lots of small changes inside lines. I don't know if there are algorithms for detecting differences in streams of bytes (instead of lines); probably there are, but I don't know if they work as well as the text comparison algorithm in diff. (There is also wdiff, which works word-wise, and seems to work okay for what it's designed: calculating differences between reformatted paragraphs of text.) * There isn't as much use for binary patches than for textual ones, because binary executables are platform-dependent. It should be possible to dump the binary files in a textual format with "od" (use one byte or word per line, unless you know the data has larger structures that you want to compare as a whole) and run diff on those, but I don't know how well that would work. -- -=- Rjs -=- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
