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What is it?

We all know the useful tool called diff. Well if you don't then look at the link a couple words back. Diff allows you to create patches for a file or a full directory. This is amazing. What if you have 2 compressed tar files that you want to compare? Well of course you could take the time to untar the files and compare from there but there could be a simplified version.

Couple use cases

Compare a zip file to a tar file

./differ.py diff my.zip my.tgz

Compare a directory to a zip file

./differ.py diff my_dir my.zip

What is the result?

In the cases above the diff will create a directory for you called diff_output. In there will create a unique directory based on the current date and time and will put your paths that were being compared into path1 and path2. Path1 is the first argument and path2 is the 2nd argument that you passed in. There will also be several directories where the changes are seen.