I need from time to time to compare files binarily but haven't found any open source tool that can do this. UltraCompare can but it's a commercial product.
Anybody know of any?
+1
A:
Subversion must know how. It supports incremental change recording for binary objects.
Worst case you could look at their source base...
dmckee
2009-02-11 05:55:29
A:
The standard GNU diff shows if two files differ. You might want to look into xdelta for tracking changes (probably what SCM tools use).
To see changes in the files you could hexdump both files and just diff them, I suppose.
sebnow
2009-02-11 06:02:04
+1
A:
GNU diffutils comes with a program called cmp that will tell you the first offset at which two binary files differ. Unfortunately, it does little more than that.
Alternatively, you could hexdump each file and pipe it into your favorite text diff tool:
diff <(hexdump -v -e '1/1 "%02x\n"' binfile1) <(hexdump -v '1/1 "%02x\n"' binfile2)
Adam Rosenfield
2009-02-11 06:03:35
Thanks for this - just wanted to add that the above `hexdump` form causes a display of one byte per line; if you want to show the same byte as both byte value and a character on a single line, an additional `-e` statement should be included for each `hexdump` - so ...
sdaau
2010-10-26 00:07:23
... the above becomes: `diff <(hexdump -v -e '1/1 "%_p "' -e '1/1 "%02x\n"' binfile1) <(hexdump -v -e '1/1 "%_p "' -e '1/1 "%02x\n"' binfile2)`
sdaau
2010-10-26 00:08:34