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diff provides several ways to adjust the
appearance of its output. These adjustments can be applied to any
output format.
- Tabs: Preserving the
alignment of tabstops.
- Pagination: Page numbering
and timestamping
diff output.
The lines of text in some of the diff output
formats are preceded by one or two characters that indicate
whether the text is inserted, deleted, or changed. The addition
of those characters can cause tabs to move to the next tabstop,
throwing off the alignment of columns in the line. GNU diff
provides two ways to make tab-aligned columns line up correctly.
The first way is to have diff convert all tabs
into the correct number of spaces before outputting them; select
this method with the -t or --expand-tabs
option. diff assumes that tabstops are set every 8
columns. To use this form of output with patch, you
must give patch the -l or --ignore-white-space
option (see section Applying Patches
with Changed White Space, for more information).
The other method for making tabs line up correctly is to add a
tab character instead of a space after the indicator character at
the beginning of the line. This ensures that all following tab
characters are in the same position relative to tabstops that
they were in the original files, so that the output is aligned
correctly. Its disadvantage is that it can make long lines too
long to fit on one line of the screen or the paper. It also does
not work with the unified output format, which does not have a
space character after the change type indicator character. Select
this method with the -T or --initial-tab
option.
It can be convenient to have long output page-numbered and
time-stamped. The -l and --paginate
options do this by sending the diff output through
the pr program. Here is what the page header might
look like for diff -lc lao tzu:
Mar 11 13:37 1991 diff -lc lao tzu Page 1
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