[X-Unix] diff Binary Files and get List of Differences

Jerry Krinock jerry at ieee.org
Sun Sep 7 17:33:59 PDT 2008


If two binary files aaa and bbb are different,

jk$ diff aaa bbb
Binary files aaa and bbb differ

True, but I would like to see a list of the differences, like diff  
gives me for text files.  I understand that this is problematic with  
binary files since they're one big line, but if, say, the file sizes  
were the same and the bytes were aligned but some were just different  
values, I'd like a list of address offsets that differ.

The man page doesn't seem to explicitly mention this limitation.

Is it true that "differ" is the only info you get when you diff binary  
files?

Does anyone have a favorite tool that would do what I want?

Thanks,

Jerry Krinock


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