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Manual Reference Pages  - chardiff (1)

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chardiff - compare a test file and a reference file character by character within lines

CONTENTS

Description
Options
Examples
See Also
License
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Authors

chardiff [options...]

chardiff compares a test file to a reference file character by character within lines The output format is "line_number: clause1 clause2 ... clauseN". Each clause specifies a character position range "Start-End". Clauses are separated from each other and the line number field by a single space. If the -x parameter is used the corresponding differing characters are emitted immediately after the character range as "(from_text/from_ref)". EOL characters are counted in the clause ranges but are not emitted. Line and character positions start at one. If the first character of the first line differs it will be described as "1: 1-1".

Exit status is 0 for no differences found, 1 for difference found, other values for an error.

chardiff may be obtained as part of the drm_tools package from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/drmtools/

--testfile,-t <TESTFILE>
	Name of the test file.
--reffile,-r <REFFILE>
	Name of the reference file.
-case-insensitive,-c
	Use case insensitive comparisons. Default is case sensitive.
--line-buffer,-b <N>
	Line buffer size, defaults to 65536. This must be larger than all input lines which will be processed.
--text,-x
	Also show text at the positions which differ. Default is to only show the positions that differ.
-h -help --help -? --??
	Print the help message. (Default - do not print help message.)
-i	Emit version, copyright, license and contact information.( Default - do not emit information.)

% cat >text.txt <<EOD abcDEFEFdef abdfredddgstmuchlonger testcasesensitivity foobar EOD % cat >ref.txt <<EOD abdfredddgstmuchlonger abcDEFEFdef TestCaseSensitivity EOD
% chardiff -t text.txt -r ref.txt 1: 3-8 10-12 13-23 2: 3-8 10-12 13-23 3: 1-1 5-5 9-9 4: 1-7
% chardiff -t text1.txt -r ref1.txt -x -c 1: 3-8(cDEFEF/dfredd) 10-12(ef/gst) 13-23(/muchlonger) 2: 3-8(dfredd/cDEFEF) 10-12(gst/ef) 13-23(muchlonger/) 4: 1-7(foobar/)

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GNU General Public License 2

Copyright (C) 2015 David Mathog and Caltech.

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David Mathog, Biology Division, Caltech <mathog@caltech.edu>