diffoscope investigates what makes two files or directory trees different. Rather than stopping at the outer file format, it recursively unpacks archives and transforms recognised binary formats into more human-readable representations before comparing their contents.
This makes it particularly valuable for reproducible-build investigations, package analysis and other situations where superficially similar artefacts need to be examined deeply. It can work directly with complex objects such as package archives, filesystem images, executables, office documents and compressed files.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Recursively examines archives and nested containers instead of comparing only their outer bytes.
- Transforms supported binary formats into representations that expose meaningful internal differences.
- Produces terminal text reports and HTML reports.
- Supports directories, Git repositories, tar archives, ZIP archives, ISO images and numerous compressed formats.
- Understands Linux filesystem images and several firmware and boot-image formats.
- Handles executable and object formats including ELF, PE, WebAssembly and LLVM bitcode.
- Supports Android APK, DEX, boot image and package resource table data.
- Understands many document, database and structured-data formats including PDF, DOCX, ODT, SQLite, JSON, XML and HTML.
- Supports language-specific artefacts including Python bytecode, Java classes and modules, OCaml interfaces and Rust objects.
- Can inspect fonts, image formats, multimedia metadata, packet captures, cryptographic files and package formats.
- Falls back to hexadecimal comparison when no more specialised comparator is available.
- Uses fuzzy matching to pair files that appear to have been renamed.
- Provides meaningful exit status codes for use in scripts and automated build checks.
Website: diffoscope.org
Support:
Developer: Many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
diffoscope is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Diff Tools | |
|---|---|
| difftastic | Structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax |
| hunk | Terminal diff viewer with syntax highlighting and side-by-side views |
| 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 |
| diffsitter | Semantic diff tool |
| objdiff | Local diffing tool for decompilation project |
| 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 |
| diffyml | Compares YAML documents by their structure |
| oyo | Step-through diff viewer |
| diff2html-cli | Generate HTML diffs |
| biodiff | Terminal-based binary diff viewer |
| dirdiff | Compute the differences between two directories |
| csvdiff | Fast diff tool for comparing CSV files |
| VBinDiff | Visual binary diff |
| riff | Wrapper around diff |
| csv-diff | Diffing CSV and JSON files |
| xmldiff | Compare XML documents |
| Patdiff | File diff using the Patience Diff algorithm |
| dead-ringer | Binary diff utility |
| sesdiff | Generates a shortest edit script |
| semdiff | Semantic diff tool written in Rust |
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