Today's task was a fruitful experience in using the diff command in a Unix shell to compare a couple of example files. This simple command proved to be "very powerful" (something Dr. Manaris seems to say about all the Unix commands we have learned in Operating Systems). In reading TOS Chapter 7, our team can now formally submit a patch to the Sugar software with our changes involving the removal of white space and the new line character (i.e. \n) from the username field. In using the diff command on my desktop PC running Ubuntu 10.04, I was able to see the changes in the two files printed to the terminal. Comparing directories produced the same results, but with a larger listing showing multiple changes in different files.
Creating a patch file seems like the way to go in getting our fix committed to the code base. Something like the following should do the trick while in the directory containing the files:
patch < model.patch window.patch
I went a little further to discover how to create the same effect in MS-DOS. As it turns out, there is the same single command, fc, that takes two files, compares them, and outputs the results to the terminal. I do not like to think that this command prompt has died, but it has not surfaced in my academic learning. But, maybe that's just the point, I am to learn Unix and to discover MS-DOS. One thing I noticed, the fc command is unable to compare two Microsoft Word documents, possibly because of all the specialized formatting in the background of every document. Simple text files created using Notepad use the ANSI Encoding attribute, so they can be used appropriately when comparing the files.
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