Re: comparison of binary files in meld

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 21 March 2012 23:13, Fabio Pasini <fabio pasini gmail com> wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> Within linux (and probably other unix flavors), you can use the "strings"
> command line tool to check printable character sequences in any file.  Use
> "man strings" at a terminal window, for more help using it.
>
> The screenshot you sent has dots for non-printables characters, so I believe
> that showing only printable chars would be enough

Unfortunately, I've been in plenty of situations where what I was
actually interested in was the non-printable characters.

> You can apply the "strings" tools to each file you want to compare, save
> each output to a temp file, and then diff/meld those temp files.
>
> Anyways, it would be nice to have meld doing this automatically for non-text
> files, when "strings" is available.

This is a useful idea, but I do think that it's a very different
request to having the hexdump-based comparison. It's also something
that is easily scriptable, so I don't think it's something that needs
to be incorporated into Meld itself.

cheers,
Kai