[ale] diff being boneheaded

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> writes:

> I've got 2 text files? > 6M lines each. Each file is sorted in dictionary
> order. diff is flagging identical lines between them as different but not all
> lines.
>
> I look at the output and can see no reason why they are flagged except for
> maybe one line is too far away from the same line in the other file.
>
> There is some crap from a mac backup list that was in a different codepage but
> I think I've fixed that.
>
> Ideas on how to tell diff to ignore the line count between lines? Basically
> all I want is a fast "these lines are not in the other file" for both files.

Try "diff -b" so that it ignores whitespace differences?  For example,
if there is a trailing space at the end of the line diff will consider
it, well, different.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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