Is there a utility that compares files word by word, instead of whole lines or single bytes? I found that I can simulate this by replacing all the spaces in a file with linefeeds, then 'diff -B' the results, but that's kind of awkward and hard to read when differences that matter come up. (For the record, I tried using OOo's document comparer, converting to text and using diff, and a few others, but none of them worked. I used to think that running text files through fmt would help, but fmt is strangely inconsistent as to where it breaks lines, even when the content within a line or two is identical.) Thanks. mhr
Hi, On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 18:02, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:> Is there a utility that compares files word by word, instead of whole > lines or single bytes?It is not exactly what you are looking for, but have you tried "vimdiff"? If lines differ, it will highlight the words that are different in them. It is still line-oriented, so it does not work if you reformat a paragraph, but if you want to find which parts of a long command line are different it is quite useful. HTH, Filipe
Find the `spiff' utility. It will compare files word by word and highlight ONLY the word differences. One can also compare numbers and change the resolution of the comparison. This lets the text "1.0" equally compare to "0.1e+1" or even "0.99999", if the fudge factor is large enough in the second case. -- Brent L. Bates (UNIX Sys. Admin.) M.S. 912 Phone:(757) 865-1400, x204 NASA Langley Research Center FAX:(757) 865-8177 Hampton, Virginia 23681-0001 Email: B.L.BATES at larc.nasa.gov http://www.vigyan.com/~blbates/