
Typically, diff is used to show the changes between two versions of the same file. The utility displays the changes in one of several standard formats, such that both humans or computers can parse the changes, and use them for patching. 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. In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Various open-source and commercial developers For the general topic of file comparison, see File comparison. The GNU Win32 port of Patch: /packages/patch.This article is about the utility program.


Once you have a patch file, you can distribute it and use either Beyond Compare or a patch utility to update the original file with the changes. Beyond Compare allows you to generate a Unix-style patch file of content differences.
