in reply to regex for identifying encrypted text
I ended up:
(a) Pre-parsing both files into arrays
(b) Using a crude state machine to skip the BEGIN ... END sections
(c) Then handing the shrunken arrays to Text::Diff
Thank you all for helping me to think through this.
P.S. This script now allows me to checkpoint my firewall config files into a config database, so that I can do things like report on how frequently we change firewall configuration.
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom