diffFiles Command

• diffFiles ?options? file1 file2
Perform a diff between two regular files. The possible options are:

-b	Ignore changes in the amount of white space.
-B	Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-c	Report only diff codes.
-E	Ignore changes due to tab expansion.
-i	Ignore case differences in file contents.
-l	Specify kind of line endings for the files.
-q	Output only whether files differ.
-t	Treat all files as text files.
-w	Ignore all white space.
--	end of options

The value of the -l option is a list {e1 ?e2?} of one or two integers that specify the kind of line endings used by the files. The possible values are indicated in the next table:

Name	Value	Description
Undefined	0	let Alpha guess
Mac	1	CR
Unix	2	LF
Windows	3	CRLF

If the second value e2 is not specified, it is equal to e1. If the -l option is not specified at all, Alpha attempts to guess.
If the command detects that the files are binary, it raises an error unless option -q or option -t is specified: with -q, the command executes a binary (byte by byte) comparison and tells whether the files differ or not. The -t option forces a textual comparison.
The return value of the command can take three forms:

if the -q option is specified, the command returns a boolean (1 or 0) that tells whether the files differ or not.
otherwise, if the -c option is specified, the command returns a list of difference markers (aka diff codes). Each marker is a string of the form
```
m1?,n1?[acd]m2?,n2?
```
This syntax is described in the Diff codes section of the Compare package.
finally, if neither -q nor -c were specified, the command returns an even-length list containing alternatively the diff codes and the corresponding diff hunks (sets of differing lines).