Diff: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:46, 2 November 2020

Diff is a class of programming utilities that compares two or more files for changes or differences between them and frequently offer methods to merge one or more files together as well. This tool is both available as a separate utility but is frequently also embedded into IDE's and text editors.

File output

Edit script: can be generated by modern implementations with the -e option
Context format: introduced with 2.8 BSD (July 1981)
Unified format: introduced by unidiff (Aug 1990), GNU diff 1.15 (Jan 1991)

Although many newer diff tools have modified the output file format for more flexibility, the original diff output file format has become something of a standard since a number of utilities and systems can open up diff files for further processing or visualisation.

Diff tools

OS/2 diff tools

Araxis PMDiff - last version 4.0c freeware
GNU diffutils - Open source

Java diff tools

Guiffy - Commercial

Text editors with diff file support

Elvis - diff syntax support included by default
FTE - Has support for syntax highlighting, code folding and syntax-aware autoindent.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 Diff is a class of programming utilities that compares two or more files for changes or differences between them and frequently offer methods to merge one or more files together as well. This tool is both available as a separate utility but is frequently also embedded into [[IDE]]'s and [[text editors]].
-==Diff as a file format==
+==File output==
-In the [[UNIX]] world diff is also a file format used by diff applications for their output, this is seldom used by applications that are native to OS/2 or [[Microsoft Windows]] but does show up in apps that are ported from one of the UNIX like systems. Although many newer diff tools have modified the output file format for more flexibility, the original diff output file format has become something of a standard since a number of utilities and systems can open up diff files for further processing or visualisation.
+;Edit script:can be generated by modern implementations with the -e option
+;Context format:introduced with 2.8 BSD (July 1981)
+;Unified format:introduced by unidiff (Aug 1990), GNU diff 1.15 (Jan 1991)
+Although many newer diff tools have modified the output file format for more flexibility, the original diff output file format has become something of a standard since a number of utilities and systems can open up diff files for further processing or visualisation.
 ==Diff tools==