On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 11:33:48AM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > Sometimes I wonder whether a tool that actually ignored the whitespace
> > in two files entirely and produced a diff that somehow avoided the
> > entire issue of differing whitespace would be useful to us.
> 
> As Itojun mentioned, there's "diff -b", which ignores horizontal white
> space but does not ignore changes in line breaks.
> 
> "wdiff" (in pkgsrc) ignores all white space, including line breaks, but
> does not ignore changes in comments.
> 
> "spiff" (not in NetBSD's pkgsrc, but available from
> http://www.darwinsys.com/freeware/) can be configured to ignore
> comments, but has an ugly output format.

Spiff is now in pkgsrc - thanks for the nudge.

Yes, its output format is ugly.

Regards,
Alistair