What's the easiest way to find out if two text files are different programmatically? Given two files I just need to know whether they are different or not. This is for a quick tool to help with a particularly nasty merge (switched languages from VB to C# in one branch (yay!) and made many changes in the other), it won't be going into production.
Possible solutions:
- Hash both files and compare the hash
- Pull the files in and just do a string compare
- Call out to an external diff tool (unfortunately Winmerge doesn't have a CLI for this)
If possible ignoring white space would be awesome but I don't care that much about it. The main thing is this it needs to be quick and easy.
I'm using .Net 3.5sp1 by the way. Thanks for any ideas or pointers.