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Accepted
Ahmad
Asked: 2020-07-15 08:27:38 +0800 CST

How do I compare equality of two files in Ubuntu?

  • 772

I have two large pkl files. I'm not interested in knowing the comparisons of the contents of two files (as we do for text files with diff, meld or vimdiff). I suspect that they are the same. Their size is equal. But if I want to get certain that they are the same, is there any comparison utility that outputs if they are the same or not?

command-line diff

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use diff with -q option. From diff's manpage:

    -q, --brief
           report only when files differ

    Example usage:

    $ diff -q a b
Files a and b differ

    If the files are identical, there will be no output. However, if you want to report if they are identical as well, you can use -s option with -q.

    From the same manpage:

    -s, --report-identical-files
           report when two files are the same

    Example usage:

    $ diff -qs a b
Files a and b are identical
    • 5

  2. I don't suppose this will be any faster than diff, but you could compare checksums of the files:

    md5sum a b | awk '
    NR == 1 {sum_a = $1; next}
    {print ($1 == sum_a) ? "equal" : "different"}
'
    • 3