Better version of diff?

Kelly Jones kelly.terry.jones at gmail.com
Sun May 17 21:29:20 UTC 2009


I often need to compare two Perl files sans comments. This mostly works:

egrep -v '^#' file1.pl > file1.tmp
egrep -v '^#' file2.pl > file2.tmp
diff -B file1.tmp file2.tmp

(yes, it breaks for perldoc style comments, comments on lines w/ code,
# characters inside HERE docs, and probably other cases-- just an
approximation)

I also often need to see if two files contain the same lines, minus
comments and allow duplicates. This mostly works:

egrep -v '^#' file1.txt | sort | uniq > file1.tmp
egrep -v '^#' file2.txt | sort | uniq > file2.tmp
diff -B file1.tmp file2.tmp;: comm would also work here

I could easily Perl script these two tasks, but my question is: has
anyone created a "super diff" that does this sort of thing and more?

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