Re: diff on .gz and .bz2 files

On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:20:22 -0600, Peng Yu wrote:

> It seems that diff can not do comparison on the decompressed files in
> .gz and .bz2 files. I could first decompress the .gz and .bz2 file and
> then do the comparison. But it would be convenient to be able to
> directly compare without explicitly decompressing any files. Could
> somebody add this feature to diff?

You could make a little script pretty easy.

$ cat /home/js/bin/gzbzdiff 
#!/bin/bash

mkfifo gzi
mkfifo bzi

gunzip -c $1 > gzi &
bunzip2 -c $2  > bzi &
diff -s bzi gzi 
rm bzi gzi 

$ gzbzdiff nsd.gz nsd.bz2 
Files bzi and gzi are identical