In Python, is there a concise way of comparing whether the contents of two text files are the same?

Question

I don\'t care what the differences are. I just want to know whether the contents are different.

Answer 1

Since I can't comment on the answers of others I'll write my own.

If you use md5 you definitely must not just md5.update(f.read()) since you'll use too much memory.

def get_file_md5(f, chunk_size=8192):
    h = hashlib.md5()
    while True:
        chunk = f.read(chunk_size)
        if not chunk:
            break
        h.update(chunk)
    return h.hexdigest()