Hari's Technical Space

Diff command compares two different files and reports the difference.

The output of the diff command is very cryptic and not straight forward

to read.

Syntax: diff [options] file1 file2

 

What was modified in my new file when compare to my old

file?

 

The option -w in the diff command will ignore the white space while

performing the comparison.

In the following diff output:

• The lines above —, indicates the changes happened in first file in

the diff command (i.e name_list.txt).

• The lines below —, indicates the changes happened to the

second file in the diff command (i.e name_list_new.txt). The lines

that belong to the first file starts with < and the lines of second

file starts with >.

 

# diff -w name_list.txt name_list_new.txt

2c2,3

< John Doe

—

> John M Doe

> Jason Bourne