Copyright 1989 AT&T Copyright (c) 2006, Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved Portions Copyright (c) 1992, X/Open Company Limited All Rights Reserved
Sun Microsystems, Inc. gratefully acknowledges The Open Group for permission to reproduce portions of its copyrighted documentation. Original documentation from The Open Group can be obtained online at
http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open Group, have given us permission to reprint portions of their documentation. In the following statement, the phrase "this text" refers to portions of the system documentation. Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form in the Sun OS Reference Manual, from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between these versions and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html.
This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.
The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the Common Development and Distribution License (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE. If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]
cmp [-l | -s] file1 file2 [skip1] [skip2]
The cmp utility compares two files. cmp writes no output if the files are the same. Under default options, if they differ, it writes to standard output the byte and line numbers at which the first difference occurred. Bytes and lines are numbered beginning with 1. If one file is an initial subsequence of the other, that fact is noted. skip1 and skip2 are initial byte offsets into file1 and file2 respectively, and can be either octal or decimal. A leading 0 denotes octal.
The following options are supported: -l
Write the byte number (decimal) and the differing bytes (octal) for each difference.
Write nothing for differing files. Return exit status only.
The following operands are supported: file1
A path name of the first file to be compared. If file1 is -, the standard input is used.
A path name of the second file to be compared. If file2 is -, the standard input is used.
If both file1 and file2 refer to standard input or refer to the same FIFO special, block special or character special file, an error results.
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of cmp when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte (2^31 bytes).
Example 1 Comparing Files Byte for Byte
The following example does a byte for byte comparison of file1 and file2:
example% cmp file1 file2 0 1024
It skips the first 1024 bytes in file2 before starting the comparison.
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of cmp: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.
The following error values are returned: 0
The files are identical.
The files are different. This includes the case where one file is identical to the first part of the other.
An error occurred.
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
| CSI Enabled |
| Interface Stability Standard |
comm(1), diff(1), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), standards(5)