Introduction
The commands in this section operate on the contents of files, usually text files. In most cases they are capable of including, or excluding, patterns, as specified by regular expressions. See the chapter on “Finding Stuff” for more information about regular expressions.
 | The dash character, “-”, is usually used to specify standard input as one of the input files. |
| comm | Compare 2 sorted files. (This command outputs common lines.) |
| cmp | Compare 2 files, usually binaries. |
| diff | Show the difference between 2 files. |
| diff3 | Show the differences between 3 files. |
| sdiff | Merge 2 files. |
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