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File::Compare - Compare files or filehandles

Author

"File::Compare" was written by Nick Ing-Simmons. Its original documentation was written by Chip Salzenberg. perl v5.40.1 2025-07-03 File::Compare(3perl)

Description

The "File::Compare::compare" function compares the contents of two sources, each of which can be a file or a file handle. It is exported from "File::Compare" by default. "File::Compare::cmp" is a synonym for "File::Compare::compare". It is exported from "File::Compare" only by request. "File::Compare::compare_text" does a line by line comparison of the two files. It stops as soon as a difference is detected. compare_text() accepts an optional third argument: This must be a CODE reference to a line comparison function, which returns 0 when both lines are considered equal. For example: compare_text($file1, $file2) is basically equivalent to compare_text($file1, $file2, sub {$_[0] ne $_[1]} )

Name

File::Compare - Compare files or filehandles

Return

"File::Compare::compare" and its sibling functions return 0 if the files are equal, 1 if the files are unequal, or -1 if an error was encountered.

Synopsis

use File::Compare; if (compare("file1", "file2") == 0) { print "They're equal\n"; }

See Also