diff reports two files differ, although they are the same!
Odd .. can you try cmp
? You may want to use the '-b
' option too.
cmp man page - Compare two files byte by byte.
This is one of the nice things about Unix/Linux .. so many tools :)
Try:
diff file1 file2 | cat -t
The -t
option will cause cat
to show any special characters clearly - eg. ^M
for CR, ^I
for tab.
From the man page (OS X):
-t Display non-printing characters (see the -v option), and display tab characters as `^I'. -v Display non-printing characters so they are visible. Control characters print as `^X' for control-X; the delete character (octal 0177) prints as `^?'. Non-ASCII characters (with the high bit set) are printed as `M-' (for meta) followed by the character for the low 7 bits.
Might the differences be caused by DOS vs. UNIX line endings, or something similar?
What if you hexdump
them? This might show differences more obviously, eg:
hexdump -C file1 > file1.hex
hexdump -C file2 > file2.hex
diff file1.hex file2.hex