Using 'diff' (or anything else) to get character-level diff between text files

Question

I\'d like to use \'diff\' to get a both line difference between and character difference. For example, consider:

File 1

abcde
ab         


        

Answer 1

You can use:

diff -u f1 f2 |colordiff |diff-highlight

colordiff is a Ubuntu package. You can install it using sudo apt-get install colordiff.

diff-highlight is from git (since version 2.9). It is located in /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight. You can put it somewhere in your $PATH.