I am looking for a text compare program/script that basically compares white spaces. In other words; Are two files formatted the same even if the data in the various fields is different between the two files? I have looked at sed , awk, diff, cmp and several forums to try to locate such a tool but have been unsuccessful so far.

The details are that I have an automated process that generates a EDI transmittal file containing invoice details (price, manufacturer and product numbers, volumes, order number, quantity,etc. This file is sent to customer for payment. Occasionally there is a need to perform some manual manipulations to the file and I want to be able to compare the changed one to an untouched "properly formatted" one to see that the manual changes were performed properly (at least in regard to formatting)?
Thanks in advance.

It sounds like you have some programming chops, I'd reccomend looking at Regular Expressions for what you want. As for what kind of script, I'd say Perl myself but I'm biased towards it and not really aware of what might work best. With RegXs you could specify it to look for specific layouts of white space and new lines

I'm pretty sure Bash shell scripts will support regular expressions in addition to several of the Linux utilities...anyone else, yay, nay?

i'd give a big 'yay' for Perl, but i think you'd have a pretty hard time finding a Perl programmer giving a 'nay', particularly for a text parsing gig

I'd probably go with perl too. What are you trying to compare - just blank lines or white space in other lines too? We could probably whip up a quick example if you can post a couple of example files, ie the before and after.

If someone more knowledgeable than I can reccomend a good module, he could hit CPAN and be on his way....