Discussion:
comparison of binary files in meld
c***@freenet.de
2012-02-23 12:28:07 UTC
Fabio Pasini
2012-03-21 13:13:49 UTC
Hello there,
Within linux (and probably other unix flavors), you can use the "strings"
command line tool to check printable character sequences in any file. Use
"man strings" at a terminal window, for more help using it.
The screenshot you sent has dots for non-printables characters, so I
believe that showing only printable chars would be enough
You can apply the "strings" tools to each file you want to compare, save
each output to a temp file, and then diff/meld those temp files.
Anyways, it would be nice to have meld doing this automatically for
non-text files, when "strings" is available.
Best regards,
Fábio
Hi all,
as I wrote earlier, I'm changing from windows to linux.
Under windows I used the comparison tool "Compare It".
This tool has a nice feature I'm missing a little bit in meld.
You can compare binary files like e. g. bitmaps.
We use it to compare our whole project-folders which also
contain binary data saved by our applications.
Would be nice to have this in meld, nevertheless meld is a great tool!
I attached a screen shot of a binary comparison.
Regards,
Claudio
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Kai Willadsen
2012-03-24 22:50:36 UTC
Post by Fabio Pasini
Hello there,
Within linux (and probably other unix flavors), you can use the "strings"
command line tool to check printable character sequences in any file. Use
"man strings" at a terminal window, for more help using it.
The screenshot you sent has dots for non-printables characters, so I believe
that showing only printable chars would be enough
Unfortunately, I've been in plenty of situations where what I was
actually interested in was the non-printable characters.
Post by Fabio Pasini
You can apply the "strings" tools to each file you want to compare, save
each output to a temp file, and then diff/meld those temp files.
Anyways, it would be nice to have meld doing this automatically for non-text
files, when "strings" is available.
This is a useful idea, but I do think that it's a very different
request to having the hexdump-based comparison. It's also something
that is easily scriptable, so I don't think it's something that needs
to be incorporated into Meld itself.
cheers,
Kai
Kai Willadsen
2012-03-24 22:46:55 UTC
Hi all,
as I wrote earlier, I'm changing from windows to linux.
Under windows I used the comparison tool "Compare It".
This tool has a nice feature I'm missing a little bit in meld.
You can compare binary files like e. g. bitmaps.
We use it to compare our whole project-folders which also
contain binary data saved by our applications.
Would be nice to have this in meld, nevertheless meld is a great tool!
I attached a screen shot of a binary comparison.
This is bug 387441:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387441
That screenshot is a good example of the kind of UI we'd be looking
at, so I'd appreciate it if you could add it to the bug.
This request has been around for a long time now. I actually really
like the idea of offering hexdump-based diff, but it would be a *lot*
of work to do properly. If anyone is interested in taking a stab at
it, I'll happily discuss what it should look like and how it would
work. I'm exceedingly unlikely to get a chance to try any time soon
though.
cheers,
Kai
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c***@freenet.de2012-02-23 12:28:07 UTC