Re: Why not diff binaries?
On 17 Jul 2000, Riku Saikkonen wrote:
> "Pavel M. Penev" <kal_pav@sz.techno-link.com> 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 -=- rjs@lloke.dna.fi
>
>
10X! I think I am going to continue my issues in another mail-list.
Gladly,
Pavel M. Penev
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