<div dir="ltr">`diff -w` will ignore whitespace entirely. this will solve problems with trailing spaces, spaces-vs-tabs, non printing spaces, etc.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Lightner, Jeff <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:JLightner@water.com" target="_blank">JLightner@water.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">cat -vt on the files should show non-printing characters including tabs - maybe output of same to additional files and diff on those would help e.g.<br>
cat -vt file1 >file1.vt<br>
cat -vt2 file2 >file2.vt<br>
diff file1.vt file2.vt<br>
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Also often if I have large files I want to diff I usually use sdiff instead (widening my terminal session as far as possible first) as it will insure the lines are reasonably close to each other. (This is a side by side diff.)<br>
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-----Original Message-----<br>
From: <a href="mailto:ale-bounces@ale.org">ale-bounces@ale.org</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:ale-bounces@ale.org">ale-bounces@ale.org</a>] On Behalf Of Stephen R. Blevins<br>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 1:29 PM<br>
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts<br>
Subject: Re: [ale] diff being boneheaded<br>
<br>
Could there be tabs in one file's lines, and spaces in the other? What about other unprintable characters?<br>
<br>
Stephen R. Blevins<br>
<a href="mailto:stephen.r.blevins@gmail.com">stephen.r.blevins@gmail.com</a><br>
<br>
On 08/07/2013 12:37 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:<br>
> I've got 2 text files > 6M lines each. Each file is sorted in<br>
> dictionary order. diff is flagging identical lines between them as<br>
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