One criminally-unknown new UNIX tool is diffoscope, a diff "on steroids" that will not only recursively unpack archives but will transform binary formats into human-readable forms in order to compare them instead of simply showing the raw difference in hexadecimal.

In an attempt to remedy its underuse, in December 2015 I created the try.diffoscope.org service so that I—and hopefully others—could use diffoscope without necessarily installing the multitude of third-party tools that using it can require. It also enables trivial sharing of the HTML reports in bugs or on IRC.

To make this even easier, I've now introduced a command-line client to the web service:

$ apt-get install trydiffoscope [ .. ] Setting up trydiffoscope ( 57 ) ... $ trydiffoscope /etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.deny --- a/hosts.allow +++ b/hosts.deny │ @@ -1,10 +1,17 @@ │ -# /etc/hosts.allow: list of hosts that are allowed to access the system. │ -# See the manual pages hosts_access ( 5 ) and hosts_options ( 5 ) . │ +# /etc/hosts.deny: list of hosts that are _not_ allowed to access the system. │ +# See the manual pages hosts_access ( 5 ) and hosts_options ( 5 ) .

You can also install it from PyPI with:

$ pip install trydiffoscope





Mirroring the original diffoscope command, you can save the output locally in an even more-readable HTML report format by appending " --html output.html ".

In addition, if you specify the --webbrowser (or -w ) argument:

$ trydiffoscope -w /etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.deny https://try.diffoscope.org/gaauupyapzkb

... this will automatically open your default browser to view the results.