On 17 Jul 2000, Riku Saikkonen wrote:
> "Pavel M. Penev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >Can someone tell me a sensible reason for not having a 'diff' equivalent > >for binary file? > > There is "cmp", but it reports only the position of the first > differing byte (if any). > > As for why not: > > * diff is helped a lot by the fact that the input is line-based text. > And diff doesn't work very well if the lines are very short or > there are lots of small changes inside lines. > > I don't know if there are algorithms for detecting differences in > streams of bytes (instead of lines); probably there are, but I > don't know if they work as well as the text comparison algorithm in > diff. > > (There is also wdiff, which works word-wise, and seems to work okay > for what it's designed: calculating differences between reformatted > paragraphs of text.) > > * There isn't as much use for binary patches than for textual ones, > because binary executables are platform-dependent. > > It should be possible to dump the binary files in a textual format > with "od" (use one byte or word per line, unless you know the data has > larger structures that you want to compare as a whole) and run diff on > those, but I don't know how well that would work. > > -- > -=- Rjs -=- [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > 10X! I think I am going to continue my issues in another mail-list. Gladly, Pavel M. Penev
