However, - as an argument by itself treats the remainingĪrguments as file names even if they begin with -.īelow is a summary of all of the options that GNU diff accepts. The file that is fully specified may not be standard input,īecause standard input is nameless and the notion of ‘‘file with theĭiff options begin with -, so normally from-file and to-file may notīegin with. Is not recursive unless the -r or -recursive option is given.ĭiff never compares the actual contents of a directory as if it were aįile. If both from-file and to-file are directories, diff compares correspondingįiles in both directories, in alphabetical order this comparison

In from-file whose file name is that of to-file, and vice versa. If from-file is a directory and to-file is not, diff compares the file As a special case, diff - compares a copy of standard A file name of - stands for text read from the standard In the simplest case, diff compares the contents of the two files from _f ileĪnd to-file. Man page(1) manual page Table of Contentsĭiff - find differences between two files Aĭescription of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found This page is part of release 3.11 of the Linux man-pages project. However, it also contains documentation for a few programs, in cases where the authors or maintainers of the program do not distribute man pages themselves. Therefore, the core Linux man-pages mainly contains the pages for system calls and library routines, special devices, and file formats. Man pages belonging to programs are usually distributed together with those programs. Corrections and additions are welcome, but review the ' Help Wanted' list, first. The Linux Documentation Project maintains an archive of snaphots of the (English language) core Linux manual pages that are maintained by Michael Kerrisk.

Linux diff between files