Software that Compares Files after Copying (2/91)


When you do a regular copy on a Macintosh (drag a folder or file to another
volume), does the Finder do any compare or verify in that command?

Is there any program that can compare two different files to see if they
are totally equal? I need a program that verifies that a copy of a file is
an image of the original.

After a copy, the Finder does minimal checking to see if any errors were
logged during the copy or verify. It doesn't do a checksum, or any
byte-for-byte comparisons of the file.

As for file comparisons, the Hard Disk Jockey disk utility from FWB lets
the user copy and verify (among other things) files on disk.

The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW), available from APDA, comes with
two utilities for comparing files:

* Compare compares the lines of two text files and writes their
differences to standard output. Options are provided to compare a
specific column range in each file, to ignore blanks, and to ignore case.

* ResEqual compares the resources in two files and writes differences in
type, identifier, size, or contents to standard output.

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string.

Published Date: Feb 20, 2012