Hexdiff: A hexadecimal differencing program

Hexdiff is a terminal application for differencing two binary files. Its output format is color-coded hexadecimal, inspired by radiff2 -x.

Features

• Arbitrary offsets can be set for each input file.
• A maximum compare length can be specified to limit the amount of compared data.
• All matching lines can be printed to the terminal window, even when they form a large contiguous block of matching data.

Installation

Hexdiff relies only on standard C libraries, with the color-coding performed by ANSI escape sequences. It can be compiled with:

gcc -o hexdiff hexdiff.c

Optimizations can be enabled during compilation, though they seem to lead to minimal performance improvements.

Usage

The user runs:

hexdiff [-a] [-n len] file1 file2 [skip1 [skip2]]

with the command line arguments:

• -a: all lines should be printed
• -h: show help
• -n: specify a maximum number of bytes to compare
• skip1: offset for file1
• skip2: offset for file2