You can use an ssh command to get the checksum for the file on a remote system to see if they are the same or different. Note that the cksum command is often used to verify the integrity of system files. By running the cksum command on each of the two systems, you can determine if they're the same without having to move either of the files to the other system or share a file system or directory. While this might not be advantageous when the files are on the same system, it can help a lot when they're on different systems. $ comm file1 file1Ĭhecksums can also tell you if files are different. $ comm file1 file2Īs you can see in the second example below, comparing a file to itself shows all of the output in column 3. The third shows the lines which are the same in both of the two files. The first and second represent the first and second files. In the example below, you can probably see that we're looking at three separate columns of output. The comm command will display the differences in text files in a different format.

Note that lines with differences include a |. If you want to see the differences between two files, but not the instructions that patch could use, you might like diff's side-by-side view. If you only want to know if the files are different, you can try a simpler approach. For most of us, this use of diff is probably not something we'd do very often.

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