Dwdiff Shows Changes Word for Word

Dec 21, 2007

Version 1.3 of dwdiff, a free front-end for the Unix diff program has just been released and is now licensed under the GPLv3.

The command line program checks texts for changes word for word, whereas the legacy Unix tool diff takes a line-oriented approach. The user can define what dwdiff sees as whitespace between words. This distinguishes the program from wdiff, which also uses a word for word approach. Apart from this, dwdiff lets users set delimiter characters which the program also treats as words if they are not surrounded by blanks.

Version 1.3 has one new option that outputs a couple of lines a context on either side of a change. Another option displays the line numbers of the two compared files. At the same time, the GPLv3 replaces the Open Software License 2.0.

The dwdiff homepage has the source code of the program, Debian/Ubuntu packages and an RPM archive available for downloading. There are also ports for OpenBSD and FreeBSD and an ebuild script for Gentoo Linux.

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