On 18 Jul 2000, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> "Pavel M. Penev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Can someone tell me a sensible reason for not having a 'diff' > > equivalent for binary file? > > What do you want to do? > > If you want the following: > > Given a binary (or text) file A and a variant of it A', > generate a patch delta(A,A') representing the differences. > > Then you can use xdelta. With xdelta, you can construct and apply > such binary patches. > > diff is also used to generate human-comprehensible differences, and > I'm not aware of a tool for doing this for binary files. > > I'm not sure such a program would be useful, but it probably would be > for certain kinds of files. For example, a diff that worked on > (mostly) text-based files, but used a character-based approach rather > than a line-based one could be very useful. At one point algorithms > for this weren't feasible (hence the line-based nature of diff), but > IIRC, there's at least one algorithm which generates minimal > differences in linear time (or thereabouts), for some definition of > "minimal", so it ought to be usable at the byte level. > Thank you all a lot. I have already been told aboult xdelta (and read its manual); moreover I think a have seen something with more features (like recusing into directories). I have what I need. I though this topic was already closed. Thaks again, Pavel
