How to diff binary files

Active 1 year, 11 months ago. Viewed 8k times. How to compute a binary diff of abc and abc2? Applications: I could only send a patch file probably max MB to the distant server, instead of reuploading the whole abc2 file it would take a few hours again!

How to do this? Improve this question. Basj Basj 2, 4 4 gold badges 26 26 silver badges 62 62 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Thanks a lot Kusalananda, it's great! What is the difference between these two similar commands?

In the case that it's empty or undefined, use abc instead". Basj I'm not entirely sure that this is possible, but I'll have a look tomorrow after sleep. It probably failed is because I tried it on Windows I'm using rsync both on Linux for my distant server, and Windows locally.

Kaz Kaz 6, 1 1 gold badge 21 21 silver badges 39 39 bronze badges. Could you possibly show an example? Thank you for your answer. Basj What is possible is to chop up the 4GB file into smaller ones say MB each , and do individual deltas. This could be wrapped into a script. When we'll compare abc-firstmb with abc2-firstmb , no match will be found, so it might not be efficient?

Have you tried just forcing diff to treat the files as text: diff -ua abc abc2 As explained here. Community Bot 1. Oops, yeah you don't actually want the n.

I'm interested to know if it works as I'm not sure how long the "lines" will be. Thanks for your comment! Any idea? Hmmm, not sure what happened. I just did it on my machine and it worked better than I had expected. I took a M file that was random integers written out in binary to a file. I changed 3 bytes in it and did the diff and patch and it worked. The resulting files were md5sum equal. If a big file has no byte 0x0a , i. Oh for sure.

To install the support tools, run Setup. To download the Windows NT 4. The Windiff. You can use Windiff. The display shows either a summary of the comparison status of a list of files outline mode or a detailed line-by-line comparison of the files expanded mode.

In the Select First File dialog box, locate and then click a file name for the first file in the comparison, and then click Open. In the Select Second File dialog box, locate and then click a file name for the second file in the comparison, and then click Open. To view the actual file differences, click the first line in the Windiff. In the Select Directories dialog box, type the two folder names that you want to compare in the Dir1 and Dir2 boxes.

If you want to include subfolders, click to select the Include subdirectories check box. To view the actual file differences, click the line that you want in the Windiff. You can also run Windiff.

For information about how to do so, or for more information about how to use Windiff. There are other utilities that are available besides Windiff. To compare two files or groups of files at a local site, you can use the Fc. Both commands are run from a command prompt. Scenario 4 — Perform a binary comparison of two different files and two identical files. You will notice that the function begins by informing you that the two files are being compared.

Next, a bunch of binary digits scroll by, which is where the files are being compared, side by side, and lastly, you receive a report that says that, FCexercise is longer than FCsample. In this comparison of two identical files, FC reports that there is no difference between the two files. Now that you know the basics of the FC tool, feel free to play with the switches and test out some new ideas.

Remember that while you are playing with files, it is best to use dummy samples like the ones provided here, in order to avoid any accidental data loss.

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