Introduction

Introduction

The commands in this section operate on the contents of files, usually text files. In most cases they are capable of including, or excluding, patterns, as specified by regular expressions. See the chapter on "Finding Stuff" for more information about regular expressions.

The dash character, "-", is usually used to specify standard input as one of the input files.

 

comm	Compare 2 sorted files. (This command outputs common lines.)
cmp	Compare 2 files, usually binaries.
diff	Show the difference between 2 files.
diff3	Show the differences between 3 files.
sdiff	Merge 2 files.