SDIFF(1) BSD Reference Manual SDIFF(1)
sdiff - side-by-side diff
sdiff [-abdilstW] [-I regexp] [-o outfile] [-w width] file1 file2
sdiff displays two files side by side, with any differences between the
two highlighted as follows: new lines are marked with '>'; deleted lines
are marked with '<'; and changed lines are marked with '|'.
sdiff can also be used to interactively merge two files, prompting at
each set of differences. See the -o option for an explanation.
The options are:
-l Only print the left column for identical lines.
-o outfile
Interactively merge file1 and file2 into outfile. In this mode,
the user is prompted for each set of differences. See EDITOR and
VISUAL, below, for details of which editor, if any, is invoked.
The commands are as follows:
l Choose left set of diffs.
r Choose right set of diffs.
s Silent mode - identical lines are not printed.
v Verbose mode - identical lines are printed.
e Start editing an empty file, which will be merged into
outfile upon exiting the editor.
e l Start editing file with left set of diffs.
e r Start editing file with right set of diffs.
e b Start editing file with both sets of diffs.
q Quit sdiff.
-s Skip identical lines.
-w width
Print a maximum of width characters on each line. The default is
130 characters.
Options passed to diff(1) are:
-a Treat file1 and file2 as text files.
-b Ignore trailing blank spaces.
-d Minimize diff size.
-I regexp
Ignore line changes matching regexp. All lines in the change must
match regexp for the change to be ignored.
-i Do a case-insensitive comparison.
-t Expand tabs to spaces.
-W Ignore all spaces (the -w flag is passed to diff(1)).
EDITOR, VISUAL
Specifies an editor to use with the -o option. If both EDITOR and
VISUAL are set, VISUAL takes precedence. If neither EDITOR nor
VISUAL are set, the default is vi(1).
TMPDIR Specifies a directory for temporary files to be created. The de-
fault is /tmp.
cmp(1), diff(1), diff3(1), vi(1), re_format(7)
sdiff was written from scratch for the public domain by Ray Lai
<ray@cyth.net>. UTF-8 support was added for MirBSD #10 by
Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>.
Although undocumented, sdiff supports all options supported by GNU sdiff.
Some options require GNU diff.
Tabs are treated as anywhere from one to eight characters wide, depending
on the current column. Terminals that treat tabs as eight characters wide
will look best.
sdiff may not work with binary data.
MirBSD #10-current February 21, 2007 1