Small, Sharp Software Tools

Installing diffutils and findutils

The diffutils^[34] package includes programs like diff, cmp, and diff3 that let you see differences between files.

Install them with this command:

$ brew install diffutils

These commands will be placed in /usr/local/bin, which will override the built-in tools due to how Homebrew modifies your PATH.

The findutils^[35] package includes find, locate, updatedb, and xargs.

$ brew install findutils

To use these tools instead of the built-in tools, you’ll have to either prefix each with a g, or add another entry to your PATH:

$ echo 'export PATH="$(brew --prefix findutils)/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"' \
> >> ~/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile

When you use which ...