[ale] diff being boneheaded

[Lightner, Jeff]

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.
cat -vt file1 >file1.vt
cat -vt2 file2 >file2.vt
diff file1.vt file2.vt

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.)





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Stephen R. Blevins
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 1:29 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] diff being boneheaded

Could there be tabs in one file's lines, and spaces in the other?  What about other unprintable characters?

Stephen R. Blevins
stephen.r.blevins at gmail.com

On 08/07/2013 12:37 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> I've got 2 text files  > 6M lines each. Each file is sorted in
> dictionary order. diff is flagging identical lines between them as
<snip>
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