dwdiff

About dwdiff

dwdiff is a diff program that operates at the word level instead of the line level. It is different from wdiff in that it allows the user to specify what should be considered whitespace, and in that it takes an optional list of characters that should be considered delimiters. Delimiters are single characters that are treated as if they are words, even when there is no whitespace separating them from preceding words or delimiters. dwdiff is mostly commandline compatible with wdiff. Only the --autopager, --terminal and --avoid-wraps options are not supported.

The default output from dwdiff is the new text, with the deleted and inserted parts annotated with markers. Command line options are available to change both what is printed, and the markers.

News

dwdiff version 2.0.2 released

This release fixes a build error on configuring using --without-unicode. Furthermore, the dwdiff Makefile now supports DESTDIR. If you have a working build of dwdiff, there is no need to upgrade as there are no code changes.

28-Oct-2011

dwdiff version 2.0.1 released

This release fixes a minor bug in the parsing of escape sequences, and includes some code cleanup.

26-Oct-2011

dwdiff version 2.0 released

This release incorporates the diff algorithm from GNU diff into dwdiff itself, removing the dependency on an external diff program. This allows dwdiff to be much faster on large files.

When two additions were seperated by a single common word or delimiter, dwdiff would report that the common word was replaced by the two additions and the common word. This is obviously not desirable, so this has been fixed. Furthermore, when using the --diff-input option, dwdiff would sometimes report changes that spanned multiple sections from the original diff file. The new version makes this impossible.

22-Oct-2011

dwdiff version 1.9 released

This release adds the --diff-input option which makes dwdiff accept a Unified diff as input and reformats it using dwdiff. This option is particularly useful to reformat the diff output of version control systems.

05-Feb-2011

dwdiff on Transifex.net

If you wish to help with translating dwdiff, you can now visit the Transifex.net page for dwdiff.

21-Mar-2010

Download

The source for dwdiff is available here. Older releases are available here.

Several Linux distributions and BSD version are shipping dwdiff packages or build scripts/ports, for example Fedora Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. For some Unix variants or derivatives, dwdiff packages are provided through external repositories:

SPARC/Solaris 2.5-10 and x86/Solaris 8-10, provided by Steve Christensen on his sunfreeware.com site.
Mac OS X, through MacPorts or Homebrew.
Slackware Linux, through Slackbuilds.org and Slacky.eu.
The OpenPKG project (a generic Unix/Linux packaging system).

If your distribution does not provide dwdiff packages, you can either build dwdiff from source, or you can try filing a feature request with the maintainers of your distribution.

Contact

You can reach me at: dwdiff @ REMOVE ghalkes.nl.
Releases are also announced on the mailing list
If you wish to help with translations, go to the Transifex.net page for dwdiff.

Copyright Notice

Versions of dwdiff before 1.3 were distributed under the Open Software License version 2.0.