Identical lines were output, but many lines were missing, including the </body> and </html> tags. This output isn't easy to read at all.
The lines aren't identical, the line-ending is different, they show up the same on your display though. diff shows _differences_, which is why you didn't see any more text, since diff couldn't find any more differences between the two files. Just because you don't find the output easy to read doesn't mean that it is hard to read, read the diff manual, it explains the format quite well. > unified diff's (-u) are nice for source code, side-by-side diff's > (-y) are wonderful for text. I didn't try that, but I tried sdiff. The difference between the diff with the side-by-side flag and sdiff isn't clear to me. sdiff is a specialised version of diff for side-by-side output. With sdiff, if a line is longer than 2048 characters, it gets cut off and there's no way to prevent it. If it's shorter, I think there's no text wrapping, so a lot of horizontal scrolling might be necessary if you want to provide the full text, which I do. You are looking at the difference between two files, if those files have long lines, so will the output, anything else would be silly since it would give you a false view of what the difference between the two files are. If you are looking for a word based difference program, try wdiff, it is also from the GNU project, and is avaiable at the usual place. Someone suggested that I try diff -u. It also gave me confusing output on the same two files: You haven't explained what is confusing. It shows three changes, one line that was replaced by another (one that contains the line-ending difference), and a single line that was removed. Both are in two different hunks (once again see the diff manual for details). > The GNU diff manual has a clear description on how to read both > these formats, including the default one, and some other formats > that I don't remeber. Good, then maybe it will be a little easier for me to write a script that creates the output that I want, but I still won't be happy about having to. Even if I understand the output, I want it understood by others without needing more than one or two lines of instructions, and without lines being truncated. diff only truncates lines because you told it to, once again you have failed to read the documentation for the tool you are trying to use: -w NUM --width=NUM Output at most NUM (default 130) columns per line. Really, this is all documented in the manual. Before you reply to this message, read the diff manual, please. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
