Looking for a program that shows differences in 2 ascii files

vxc69 · 09-28-2007, 01:43 PM

Hello there,

I'm looking for a program that shows differences in two ascii files, particularly differences in source code of two files (i.e. both contain the same code one with the correct code and the other with some mistakes). Can emacs do this? I'm not sure and I'm not too keen on using emacs for some reason.

Thanks,
vxc

PatrickNew · 09-28-2007, 02:09 PM

You would be looking for a command called 'diff'. It's probably already on your computer.

vxc69 · 09-28-2007, 02:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PatrickNew

You would be looking for a command called 'diff'. It's probably already on your computer.

I've used diff before, if I recall correctly it was while patching some code some time back, I was just following instructions and didn't really bother finding out what diff actually did.

diff will work fine, thanks Patrick!

PTrenholme · 09-28-2007, 03:29 PM

If you would, instead, prefer a GUI, look at kdiff3. (A KDE application.)

vxc69 · 09-28-2007, 06:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PTrenholme

If you would, instead, prefer a GUI, look at kdiff3. (A KDE application.)

I got tkdiff instead. Don't really use KDE anymore so don't want to install all the dependecies just for kdiff.

Thanks

fcdev · 09-29-2007, 02:19 AM

If it's any help, there's a very good source-compare tool for Windows called Beyond Compare. I used it before in my previous job to manage source code submissions from multiple programmers. I haven't looked into kdiff3, tkdiff, or diff ... but since I now need a source compare tool for Linux, I will.

vxc69 · 09-29-2007, 08:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fcdev

If it's any help, there's a very good source-compare tool for Windows called Beyond Compare. I used it before in my previous job to manage source code submissions from multiple programmers. I haven't looked into kdiff3, tkdiff, or diff ... but since I now need a source compare tool for Linux, I will.

You gotta buy that though, low on cash right now. Thanks for the info anyways, might come in handy one day.

sunils1973 · 10-01-2007, 12:34 PM

What u required is the "comm" command

It compares the files and produces output in three columns
1) Lines unique to first file only
2) Lines unique to second file only
3) Lines common to both files

we can suppress each columns by applying -1,-2 and -3