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.