At work we've been discussing (below) 'diff' running out of memory. I've tried to see if 'rdiff' can help (but no idea how to back out the differences from the "delta" o/p file). I've seen that freeBSD has a diff utility (eg 2bsd-diff) that does NOT read in all of the files in one go and thus has less problems with 'memory exhausted' but I cannot find a Debian equivalent. Therefore,
does anybody know of a freeBSD->Debian ports site? I did try downloading the 2.11bsd-diff source but it doesn't build on my system (unsurprisingly!) Thanks, Michael -------- Forwarded Message -------- > From: Michael Bane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [MAN-UNIX-GROUP] (visual) diff for large files > Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 12:50:22 +0100 > > On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 17:23 +0100, michael wrote: > > Like many I now generate large files (for purpose of this discussion > > even 1.5GB is large), they are ASCII and I wish to 'diff' them > > visually. > > > > For reasonably sized files (up to a few GB) 'diff' will tell me where > > the differences are for given lines but sometimes it's a bit tricky to > > interpret. (And does it take a while (and SO SO SO much memory!) for > > large files!) > > > > 'sdiff' seems to do the job, producing side-by-side output, againg for > > reasonably sized files... however it seems to show only the first 50 (if > > that) cols of output which isn't much help for me (each of my rows are > > about 150 chars wide) > > > > My favourite tool, to date, has been 'xxdiff' (as per SGI's 'xdiff') but > > that falls over on files over about 1.5GB. It seems as thou xdiff calls > > diff and the memory usage is somehow doubled compared to 'diff' alone... > > > > I've quickly tried 'tkdiff' and that falls over even more often. > > > > So, my question is, given the >>GB files that are in common use today, > > especially on high performance computing machines (with say 16GB RAM and > > 32GB swap), how do people compare their outputs? I'm presuming most of > > the utilities fall over since they try and keep everything in memory and > > once that's full they fall over (with the side effect of bringing that > > machine painfully > > S...L.......O...........W..............L..............Y to its knees) > > > > What do people on horace use for large files? Or on your own HPC > > clusters or even desktops? I've spend way too many hours this month > > cutting files into segments in order to pass to xxdiff... > > > > It appears that freeBSD has solved the problem of diff starting off by > reading files (and thus exhausting memory)... > http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/textproc/2bsd-diff.html > but does anybody know of freeBSD to Debian (or Fedora) ports??? > > Thanks, Michael > > > > Many thanks, Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
