diffutils

"diff" no longer reports spurious differences merely because two entries in the same directory have names that compare equal in the current locale, or compare equal because "--ignore-file-name-case" was given.

Lack of a newline at the end of file reporting was fixed. When printing preceding "function" lines for a hunk, lines are trimmed in order to avoid truncating the function name. Binary file differences are once again denoted with the word "binary" for clarity.

A new --suppress-blank-empty diff option was added. Support for `diff -NUM' was reintroduced. The sdiff now understands '1' and '2' as synonyms for 'l' and 'r'. There is a change in behavior: sdiff and diff3 now invoke diff, not $(bindir)/diff. gnulib support was updated.

Problems in the build system and some other bugs
were fixed.

The programs now support behavior conformant to
POSIX 1003.1-2001. Options to diff that accepted
regular expressions now conform to the grep syntax
rather than the GNU Emacs syntax for regexps. An
option to diff3 and sdiff allows you to use other
diff utilities than the one that comes with
diffutils. cmp supports BSD-style options to
specify the bytes to skip at the start of the
files. Support was improved for locales other than
the `C' (POSIX) locale and for MS-DOS. Support for
large files (>2 GB) was added. Man pages are now
provided. Some of the diagnostics were reworded so
that they are more consistent.