This article spotlights alternative tools to cmp, a command-line utility that compares two files of any type and writes the results to the standard output.
The software featured here is free and open source. All tools provide a command-line interface (CLI) unless otherwise stated.
| Terminal-Based Diff Tools | |
|---|---|
| difftastic | Structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax |
| diff-so-fancy | Attractive diffs with diff-highlight and more |
| delta | Viewer for git and diff output |
| icdiff | An improved colored diff |
| diffoscope | In-depth comparison of files, archives, and directories |
| colordiff | Wrapper for diff with pretty syntax highlighting |
| ydiff | Tool to view colored, incremental diff in a version controlled workspace |
| diffr | Word-by-word diff highlighting utility |
| dyff | diff tool for YAML files |
| Wdiff | Wordwise implementation of diff |
| dwdiff | diff program that operates at the word level |
| diff2html-cli | Generate HTML diffs |
| dirdiff | Compute the differences between two directories |
| csv-diff | Diffing CSV and JSON files |
| csvdiff | Fast diff tool for comparing CSV files |
| sesdiff | Generates a shortest edit script |
An honorable mention obviously goes to diff, a famous console based file comparison utility that outputs the differences between two files. The diff utility was developed in the early 1970s on the Unix operating system.
Are we missing any open source alternatives to cmp? Please let us know.
All the CLI tools in this series.
| Alternatives to CLI tools |
|---|
| age // awk // bc // cal // cat // cd // chmod // cksum // cloc // cmp // compress // cp // cron // curl // cut // date // dd // df // diff // dig // du // fdisk // find // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // strings // sudo // sysctl // tail // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
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