wdiff is a front end to diff for comparing files on
a word per word basis. It works by creating two temporary files, one
word per line, and then executes diff on these files. It collects the
diff output and uses it to produce a nicer display of word differences
between the original files.
mdiff studies one or more input files altogether, and discovers
blocks of items which repeat at more than one place. Items may be lines,
words, or units defined by user. When in word mode, mdiff compares
two files, finding which words have been deleted or added to the first
in order to create the second, which is useful when two texts differ
only by a few words and paragraphs have been refilled. The program has
many output formats and interacts well with terminals and pagers (notably
with less).
unify is able to convert context diffs to unidiff format, or the
other way around. Some people just prefer one format and despise the
other, it is a religious issue. This program brings peace back to Earth.
wdiff2 is intended as a replacement to wdiff.
It aims at supporting the same set of options, but uses mdiff
instead of diff as its backend.
wdiff, mdiff and wdiff2
were written by François Pinard, while
unify has been contributed by Wayne Davison.
Please report bugs to wdiff-bugs@gnu.org.
Include the version number, which
you can find by running the program with --version. Please include
in your message sufficient input to reproduce what you got, the output you
indeed expected, and careful explanations about the nature of the problem.