Compare two binary files. The algorithm: repeatedly find the longest prefix of file 1 in file 2, advance in file 1 and mark the addresses in file 2 as used.
Table of contents:
options file1 file2
- options: Zero or more of the following, separated by spaces:
-m Nor--min-match-len N: Only find matches of at leastNbytes.Nis a positive integer.- The default is 8.
-d Nor--max-distance N: Do not find matches whose addresses differ by more thanNbytes.Nis -1 or a greater integer.- -1 means there is no limit.
- The default is -1.
- This option is experimental! It will let many matches through that don't fulfill the requirement. It should not eliminate correct matches anymore, however.
-tor--tabular: See "Output format" below.-por--progress: Print messages that indicate progress.
- file1 and file2: Two binary files to compare.
- Neither file may be empty.
- The files need not be the same size.
If the -t or --tabular option is not specified, the output lines will consist of three integers separated by commas: position in file 1, position in file 2, length. If one of the positions is empty, the line denotes an unmatched chunk, otherwise a match. Positions start from 0. E.g. 10,20,3 means bytes 10–12 in file 1 are identical to bytes 20–22 in file 2, and 40,,5 means no match in file 2 was found for bytes 40–44 in file 1.
If the -t or --tabular option is specified, the results will be printed as a table of inclusive hexadecimal address ranges instead.
Suppose we have the following files:
a.txt:abcdefgh ijklmnop qrstuvwx ABCDEFGHb.txt:ijklmnop abcdefgh qrstuvwx IJKLMNOP
The command python3 binary_diff.py a.txt b.txt will print:
"position in file1","position in file2","length"
0,9,9
9,0,9
18,18,9
27,,8
,27,8
The command python3 binary_diff.py --tabular a.txt b.txt will print:
file1 0- 8 = file2 9- 11
file1 9- 11 = file2 0- 8
file1 12- 1a = file2 12- 1a
file1 1b- 22 = file2 (nothing)
file1 (nothing) = file2 1b- 22
- Fix the
--max-distanceoption.