I Need a Binary Comparison Tool for Win/Linux

I need a binary comparison tool for Win/Linux

I found VBinDiff. I haven't used it, but it probably does what you want.

How to compare binary files to check if they are the same?

The standard unix diff will show if the files are the same or not:

[me@host ~]$ diff 1.bin 2.bin
Binary files 1.bin and 2.bin differ

If there is no output from the command, it means that the files have no differences.

Tool for comparing 2 binary files in Windows

A few possibilities:

• VBinDiff (binary diff, designed for large files)
• WinDiff
• bsdiff
• HexCmp

See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20151122151611/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/688504/binary-diff-tool-for-very-large-files

Is there any open source binary differ?

There's an open-source product called VBinDiff that I found in a search, but I don't have any direct experience with it. It appears to be cross-platform (Linux and Windows) and has packages for the binaries and source. Good luck!

Need Linux cmd-line app to compare binary files and exit on 1st mis-match

cmp doesn't have this option, because it always quits on the first mismatch.

$ cmp -b /bin/ls /bin/sed
/bin/ls /bin/sed differ: byte 25, line 1 is 320 M-P 300 M-@

Is there a popular Linux/Unix format for binary diffs?

For arbitrary binaries, of course it makes sense to use a general purpose tool:

• xdelta
• bspatch
• rdiff-backup (rsync)
• git diff

(Yes, git diff works on files that aren't under version control. git diff --binary --no-index dir1/file.bin dir2/file.bin )

I would usually recommend a generic tool before writing your own, even if there is a little overhead. While none of the tools in the above list produce binary diffs in a format quite as ubiquitous as the "unified diff" format, they are all "close to" standard tools.

There is one other fairly standardised format that might be relevant for you: the humble hexdump. The xxd tool dumps binaries into a fairly standard text format by default:

0000050: 2020 2020 5858 4428 3129 0a0a 0a0a 4e08      XXD(1)....N.

That is, offset followed by a series of byte values. The exact format is flexible and configurable with command-line switches.

However, xxd can also be used in reverse mode to write those bytes instead of dumping them.

So if you have a file called patch.hexdump:

00000aa: bbccdd

Then running xxd -r patch.hexdump my.binary will modify the file my.binary to modify three bytes at offset 0xaa.

Finally, I should also mention that dd can seek into a binary file and read/write a given number of bytes, so I guess you could use "shell script with dd commands" as your patch format.

How to tell binary from text files in linux

The diff manual specifies that

diff determines whether a file is text
or binary by checking the first few
bytes in the file; the exact number of
bytes is system dependent, but it is
typically several thousand. If every
byte in that part of the file is
non-null, diff considers the file to
be text; otherwise it considers the
file to be binary.

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