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Summarizing Which Files Differ

When you only want to find out whether files are different, and you don't care what the differences are, you can use the summary output format. In this format, instead of showing the differences between the files, diff simply reports whether files differ. The '-q' and '--brief' options select this output format.

This format is especially useful when comparing the contents of two directories. It is also much faster than doing the normal line by line comparisons, because diff can stop analyzing the files as soon as it knows that there are any differences.

For more discussion, see the following documentation.

- Hunks
- Suppressing Differences in Blank and Tab Spacing
- Suppressing Case Differences
- Suppressing Differences in Blank Lines
- Suppressing Lines Matching a Regular Expression
- Summarizing Which Files Differ
- Binary Files and Forcing Text Comparisons
- diff Output Formats

You can also get a brief indication of whether two files differ by using cmp. For files that are identical, cmp produces no output. When the files differ, by default, cmp outputs the byte offset and line number where the first difference occurs. You can use the '-s' option to suppress that information, so that cmp produces no output and reports whether the files differ using only its exit status (see Invoking cmp).

Unlike diff, cmp cannot compare directories; it can only compare two files.