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The file types addressed by individual file comparison apps varies but may include text, symbols, images, audio, or video. This category of software tool is often called "file comparison" or "diff tool", but those effectively are equivalent terms — where the term "diff" is more commonly associated with the Unix diff utility.
This is the main difference between Diff-Text and most other text comparison algorithms. Diff-Text will always match up significant similarities even if contained within non-identical or moved lines. It never resorts to guessing or the first match that happens to be found, which may result in non-optimal matches elsewhere.
Meld is a visual diff and merge tool, targeted at developers. It allows users to compare two or three files or directories visually, color-coding the different lines. Meld can be used for comparing files, directories, and version controlled repositories.
Some widely used file comparison programs are diff, cmp, FileMerge, WinMerge, Beyond Compare, and File Compare. Because understanding changes is important to writers of code or documents, many text editors and word processors include the functionality necessary to see the changes between different versions of a file or document.
In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other.
fc can compare text files as well as binary files. [9] The latest versions [which?] can compare ASCII or Unicode text. The result of comparisons are output to the standard output. The output of fc is intended primarily to be human readable and may be difficult to use in other programs.
Handles DOS, Unix, and Mac text file formats; Unicode support (as of version 2.8.0, UTF-8 files are correctly read without a BOM) Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes; Location pane shows map of files compared; Highlights differences inside lines in file compare; Can also generate HTML report with differences highlighted
ExamDiff Pro is a commercial software utility for visual file and directory comparison, for Microsoft Windows. ExamDiff Pro has a double-pane view that allows side-by-side comparisons, with color-coded line numbers indicating whether each line is added, deleted, or changed. ExamDiff Pro can compare text and binary files, and directories.