Manpages - File_Compare.3perl

:Compare - Compare files or filehandles

use :Compare; if (compare(“file1”,“file2”) == 0) { print “Theyre equal\n”; }

The function compares the contents of two sources, each of which can be a file or a file handle. It is exported from :Compare by default.

is a synonym for . It is exported from :Compare only by request.

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]} )

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

:Compare was written by Nick Ing-Simmons. Its original documentation was written by Chip Salzenberg.