On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Richard Atkinson wrote: > I'm sure this topic has come up before, but I don't recall the outcome - > is there any way under Unix to do a binary compare of two files? Something > like diff but operating on arbitrary binary files rather than text. Pipe the files through "od -Ax -t x1" and compare the output of the two dumps. I think Emacs diff (M-x ediff-buffers) is the best comparison tool; unfortunately it doesn't work in hexl-mode (the hexadecimal editing mode for Emacs). Another good dumping tool is the hexdump command shipped with some Linux distributions. I use it with the following alias: alias dump='hexdump -e '"'"'"%05.5_ax: " 16/1 "%02x "'"'"' -e '"'"'" : " 16/1 "%_p" "\n"'"'" Aren't those sequences of single and double quotes nice? :-) There probably is a shorter way to escape quotes, but I didn't want to use backslashes at that time. Marko PS: I've never heard of a "hex" command; it's not part of POSIX.2 (ISO/IEC 9945-2:1993). It's probably an alias. - This message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail cbm-hackers-request@dot.tcm.hut.fi.
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