Copyright (C) 1992, 1994 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.
The program wdiff
is a front end to diff
for comparing
files on a word per word basis. A word is anything between whitespace.
This is useful for comparing two texts in which a few words have been
changed and for which paragraphs have been refilled. It works by
creating two temporary files, one word per line, and then executes
diff
on these files. It collects the diff
output and uses
it to produce a nicer display of word differences between the original
files.
Ideally, wdiff
should avoid calling diff
and do all the
work internally, allowing it to be faster and more polished. However, I
loathe replicating the diff
algorithm and development effort,
instead of improving diff
itself. It would be more sensible to
integrate wdiff
into diff
than the other way around. I
did it this way only because I had a sudden and urgent need for it, and
it would have taken too much time to integrate it correctly into GNU
diff
. Your advice or opinions about this are welcome.
wdiff
was written by Pinard. Please report
bugs to `bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu'. Include the version
number, which you can find by running `wdiff --version'.
Include in your message sufficient input to reproduce the problem
and also, the output you expected.