How to read a Diff

If you haven’t worked with diffs before, this can be something quite new or different.

If we have two files, let’s say a grocery list, in two files. We’ll call them ‘a’ and ‘b’.

Input: Old

$ cat old
🍎
🍐
🍊
🍋
🍒
🥑

Output: New

$ cat new
🍎
🍐
🍊
🍋
🍍
🥑

We can see that they have some different entries. We’ve removed 🍒 because they’re awful, and replaced them with an 🍍

Diff lets us compare these files

$ diff old new
5c5
< 🍒
---
> 🍍

Here we see that 🍒 is only in a, and 🍍 is only in b. But otherwise the files are identical.

There are a couple different formats to diffs, one is the ‘unified diff’

$ diff -U2 old new
--- old	2022-02-16 14:06:19.697132568 +0100
+++ new	2022-02-16 14:06:36.340962616 +0100
@@ -3,4 +3,4 @@
 🍊
 🍋
-🍒
+🍍
 🥑

This is basically what you see in the training materials which gives you a lot of context about the changes:

• --- old is the ‘old’ file in our view
• +++ new is the ‘new’ file
• @@ these lines tell us where the change occurs and how many lines are added or removed.
• Lines starting with a - are removed from our ‘new’ file
• Lines with a + have been added.

So when you go to apply these diffs to your files in the training:

1. Ignore the header
2. Remove lines starting with - from your file
3. Add lines starting with + to your file

The other lines (🍊/🍋 and 🥑) above just provide “context”, they help you know where a change belongs in a file, but should not be edited when you’re making the above change. Given the above diff, you would find a line with a 🍒, and replace it with a 🍍

Added & Removed Lines

Removals are very easy to spot, we just have removed lines

--- old	2022-02-16 14:06:19.697132568 +0100
+++ new	2022-02-16 14:10:14.370722802 +0100
@@ -4,3 +4,2 @@
 🍋
 🍒
-🥑

And additions likewise are very easy, just add a new line, between the other lines in your file.

--- old	2022-02-16 14:06:19.697132568 +0100
+++ new	2022-02-16 14:11:11.422135393 +0100
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
 🍎
+🍍
 🍐
 🍊

Completely new files

Completely new files look a bit different, there the “old” file is /dev/null, the empty file in a Linux machine.

$ diff -U2 /dev/null old
--- /dev/null	2022-02-15 11:47:16.100000270 +0100
+++ old	2022-02-16 14:06:19.697132568 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+🍎
+🍐
+🍊
+🍋
+🍒
+🥑

And removed files are similar, except with the new file being /dev/null

--- old	2022-02-16 14:06:19.697132568 +0100
+++ /dev/null	2022-02-15 11:47:16.100000270 +0100
@@ -1,6 +0,0 @@
-🍎
-🍐
-🍊
-🍋
-🍒
-🥑

Persistent URL

Still have questions?