ef6 Options to cmp Contents|Index|Previous|Next

Options to cmp

The following is a summary of all of the options that GNU cmp accepts. Most options have two equivalent names, one of which is a single letter preceded by '-', and the other of which is a long name preceded by '--'. Multiple single letter options (unless they take an argument) can be combined into a single command line word: '-cl' is equivalent to '-c -l'.

'-c'
Print the differing characters. Display control characters as a 'ˆ' followed by a letter of the alphabet and precede characters that have the high bit set with 'M-' (which stands for "meta").

'--ignore-initial=bytes'
Ignore any differences in the the first bytes bytes of the input files. Treat files with fewer than bytes bytes as if they are empty.

'-l'
Print the (decimal) offsets and (octal) values of all differing bytes.

'--print-chars'
Print the differing characters. Display control characters as a 'ˆ' followed by a letter of the alphabet and precede char-acters that have the high bit set with 'M-' (which stands for "meta").

'--quiet'
'-s'
'--silent'
Do not print anything; return exit status indicating whether files differ.

'--verbose'
Print the (decimal) offsets and (octal) values of all differing bytes.

'-v'
'--version'
Output the version number of cmp.

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