The Easiest Way Ever to Compare 2 Texts

Here's another reason to use Linux: You can use the beautiful terminal tool called wdiff (more useful when only certain words in a sentence may have changed, as opposed to whole sentences or code, in which case, diff is a better tool)

How do you use it? First, you'll have to install it (simple standard "
sudo apt-get install wdiff" is enough - HA! Let's see Windows install anything that easily!)

Then, just use this crazy little command whenever you need to compare two documents:

echo "Enter text1 (press Enter,Ctrl+D when done):"; cat > /tmp/1.txt; echo "Enter text2 (press Enter,Ctrl+D when done):"; cat > /tmp/2.txt; echo "Comparing..."; wdiff -n -w $'\033[1;31m' -x $'\033[0m' -y $'\033[1;32m' -z $'\033[0m' -s /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt; rm /tmp/1.txt; rm /tmp/2.txt

Or, let's just make our lives easier and put all of that into a function (therefore, making it more nicely written and easier to understand too)

function 2compare {
  echo "Enter text1 (press Enter,Ctrl+D when done):"
  cat > /tmp/1.txt
  echo "Enter text2 (press Enter,Ctrl+D when done):"
  cat > /tmp/2.txt
  echo "Comparing..."
  wdiff -n -w $'\033[1;31m' -x $'\033[0m' -y $'\033[1;32m' -z $'\033[0m' -s /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt
  rm /tmp/1.txt
  rm /tmp/2.txt
}
Now, all you have to do is call 2compare and you will be able to compare texts.

Well, let's break it down, shall we?

The echo parts just show useful messages on the screen.
The cat parts store the data taken as input into temporary locations /tmp/1.txt and /tmp/2.txt
The wdiff part is the scariest bit but is quite simple (as we shall see):

• -n is a short way of saying --avoid-wraps which means "do not extend fields through newlines"
• -w $'\033[1;31m' -x $'\033[0m' -y $'\033[1;32m' -z $'\033[0m' sets up colours to show the differences in a much more easy to see way. wdiff by default shows colourless output (and shows differences using brackets etc.)
• -s or --statistics causes wdiff to show how many words were added, deleted etc.
• /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt just specifies the files to be compared

The rm parts remove the temporary files

But what if you don't want to keep rewriting that crazy long function each time you restart your terminal?
You can place it at the end of ~/.bashrc and then you'll be able to use 2compare directly from your terminal next time onwards.

This command is staying in my ~/.bashrc probably permanently from now on. Maybe I'll post some other useful stuff I have in there in later blog posts.

Do you know of any other ways of comparing files? Any new terminal tricks?
Leave your comments below.