How to count differences between two files on linux?

Question

I need to work with large files and must find differences between two. And I don\'t need the different bits, but the number of differences.

To find the number of dif

Answer 1

diff -U 0 file1 file2 | grep -v ^@ | wc -l

That minus 2 for the two file names at the top of the diff listing. Unified format is probably a bit faster than side-by-side format.