On Wed, 23 May 2012 13:47:22 +1000 (EST)
Tim Connors <[email protected]> wrote:
> Have you tried it?
Yes, and wrongly, on Tuesday -- fortunately your reply showed my
mistake. (My 'wdiff -a' input was two versions of a 'man' page that
had some control characters in it, which 'less' didn't like, and at the
time seemed like garbage.)
> Even if I unset $LESS on my system (which normally
> contains "-R"), wdiff -a automatically pages to less (hmm, maybe you
> need to set PAGER to "less" rather than "more" too). And if you don't
> explicitly pipe to a pager and just let "wdiff -a" do it, then wdiff
> overstrikes the characters such that less (maybe you need a real
> terminal like xterm rather than something crappy like gnome-terminal)
> colourises it correctly.
Very helpful, thanks -- how little I'd looked into 'wdiff'! This works
(no highlighting, but the text equivalent):
# change the first 'o' from 'fortune' quote to 'oo'; compare.
% fortune | tee /tmp/fub2 | sed 's/o/oo/1' > /tmp/fub1 ; wdiff
/tmp/fub[12]
[-Trooubled-]{+Troubled+} day for virgins over 16 who are beautiful and
wealthy and live
in eucalyptus trees.
And 'wdiff -a ...' does indeed highlight.
The '-t' ('--terminal') switch also provides more or less the thing
desired:
wdiff -t /tmp/fub*
Except it's not in color. 'info wdiff' shows a way (bash):
wdiff -n \
-w $'\033[30;41m' -x $'\033[0m' \
-y $'\033[30;42m' -z $'\033[0m' \
... | less -R
This will print deleted text black on red, and inserted text
black on green
Sometimes I don't want to see the common words, or any lines of "===="
that the '--no-common' switch outputs. Of course a built-in switch
would be simpler; until then, for users in the same spot, a bash
function:
# Usage: minimal_colorwdiff file1 file2
# minimal_colorwdiff diff_file
minimal_colorwdiff() { \
{ [ "$2" ] \
&& wdiff -3 -w $'\033[30;41m' -x $'\033[0m' \
-y $'\033[30;42m' -z $'\033[0m' $1 $2 \
|| wdiff -3d -w $'\033[30;41m' -x $'\033[0m' \
-y $'\033[30;42m' -z $'\033[0m' $1 ; \
} | sed -n '/^$\|^=*$\|^.*-- .*++ .*/!p' ; \
}
This one takes two args, (files to be diff'd); or one arg, (a single
diff file, in which case it'll also omit any leading line of filename
metadata).
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