How to compare binary files to check if they are the same

Question

What is the easiest way  using a graphical tool or command line on Ubuntu Linux  to know if two binary files are the same or not  except for the time stamps   I do not need to actually extract the difference  I just need to know whether they are the same or not

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I ended up using hexdump to convert the binary files to there hex representation and then opened them in meld   kompare   any other diff tool  Unlike you I was after the differences in the files   hexdump tmp Circle 24 png  gt  tmp hex1 txt hexdump  tmp Circle 24 png  gt  tmp hex2 txt  meld tmp hex1 txt tmp hex2 txt

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You can use MD5 hash function to check if two files are the same  with this you can not see the differences in a low level  but is a quick way to compare two files   md5  lt filename1 gt  md5  lt filename2 gt    If both MD5 hashes  the command output  are the same  then  the two files are not different

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Diff with the following options would do a binary comparison to check just if the files are different at all and it d output if the files are the same as well   diff -qs  file1   file2    If you are comparing two files with the same name in different directories  you can use this form instead   diff -qs  file1  --to-file  dir2    OS X El Capitan

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Radiff2 is a tool designed to compare binary files  similar to how   regular diff compares text files    Try radiff2 which is a part of radare2 disassembler  For instance  with this command   radiff2 -x file1 bin file2 bin   You get pretty formatted two columns output where differences are highlighted

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Use sha1 to generate checksum   sha1  FILENAME1  sha1  FILENAME2

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Use cmp command  Refer to Binary Files and Forcing Text Comparisons for more information   cmp -b file1 file2

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The standard unix diff will show if the files are the same or not    me host     diff 1 bin 2 bin Binary files 1 bin and 2 bin differ   If there is no output from the command  it means that the files have no differences

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Try diff -s Short answer  run diff with the -s switch  Long answer  read on below   Here s an example  Let s start by creating two files with random binary contents    dd if  dev random bs 1k count 1 of test1 bin 1 0 records in 1 0 records out 1024 bytes  1 0 kB  1 0 KiB  copied  0 0100332 s  102 kB s                                                                                       dd if  dev random bs 1k count 1 of test2 bin 1 0 records in 1 0 records out 1024 bytes  1 0 kB  1 0 KiB  copied  0 0102889 s  99 5 kB s  Now let s make a copy of the first file    cp test1 bin copyoftest1 bin  Now test1 bin and test2 bin should be different    diff test1 bin test2 bin Binary files test1 bin and test2 bin differ      and test1 bin and copyoftest1 bin should be identical    diff test1 bin copyoftest1 bin  But wait  Why is there no output    The answer is  this is by design  There is no output on identical files  But there are different error codes    diff test1 bin test2 bin Binary files test1 bin and test2 bin differ    echo    1     diff test1 bin copyoftest1 bin    echo    0  Now fortunately you don t have to check error codes each and every time because you can just use the -s  or --report-identical-files  switch to make diff be more verbose    diff -s test1 bin copyoftest1 bin Files test1 bin and copyoftest1 bin are identical

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I found Visual Binary Diff was what I was looking for  available on    Ubuntu    sudo apt install vbindiff  Arch Linux   sudo pacman -S vbindiff  Mac OS X via MacPorts    port install vbindiff  Mac OS X via Homebrew   brew install vbindiff

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There is a relatively simple way to check if two binary files are the same    If you use file input output in a programming language  you can store each bit of both the binary files into their own arrays    At this point the check is as simple as    if file1    file2         do this  else       do that

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md5sum binary1 binary2   If the md5sum is same  binaries are same  E g  md5sum new  89c60189c3fa7ab5c96ae121ec43bd4a  new txt 89c60189c3fa7ab5c96ae121ec43bd4a  new1 txt root TinyDistro    cat new  aa55 aa55 0000 8010 7738 aa55 aa55 0000 8010 7738   root TinyDistro    cat new  aa55 aa55 000 8010 7738 aa55 aa55 0000 8010 7738 root TinyDistro    md5sum new  4a7f86919d4ac00c6206e11fca462c6f  new txt 89c60189c3fa7ab5c96ae121ec43bd4a  new1 txt

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For finding flash memory defects  I had to write this script which shows all 1K blocks which contain differences  not only the first one as cmp -b does      bin sh  f1 testinput dat f2 testoutput dat  size   stat -c s  f1  i 0 while    i -lt  size    do   if   r   cmp -n 1024 -i  i -b  f1  f2    then     printf   8x   s n   i   r    fi   i   expr  i   1024  done   Output      2d400  testinput dat testoutput dat differ  byte 3  line 1 is 200 M-   240 M-     2dc00  testinput dat testoutput dat differ  byte 8  line 1 is 327 M-W 127 W    4d000  testinput dat testoutput dat differ  byte 37  line 1 is 270 M-8 260 M-0    4d400  testinput dat testoutput dat differ  byte 19  line 1 is  46  amp   44     Disclaimer  I hacked the script in 5 min  It doesn t support command line arguments nor does it support spaces in file names

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My favourite ones using xxd hex-dumper from the vim package    1  using vimdiff  part of vim      bin bash FILE1   1  FILE2   2  vimdiff  lt   xxd   FILE1     lt   xxd   FILE2      2  using diff     bin bash FILE1  1 FILE2  2 diff -W 140 -y  lt   xxd  FILE1    lt   xxd  FILE2     colordiff   less -R -p

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Use cmp command  This will either exit cleanly if they are binary equal  or it will print out where the first difference occurs and exit

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