February 2004
Beginner
200 pages
5h 40m
English
diff | Line-by-line comparison of two files or directories |
comm | Line-by-line comparison of two sorted files |
cmp | Byte-by-byte comparison of two files |
md5sum | Compute a checksum of the given files (MD5) |
There are three ways to compare Linux files:
Line by line (diff, diff3, sdiff, comm), best suited to text files
Byte by byte (cmp), often used for binary files
By comparing checksums (md5sum, sum, cksum)
These programs are all text-based. For a graphical file-comparison tool, try xxdiff at http://xxdiff.sourceforge.net.