TJRandall:

I recently had a problem where someone *radically* reformatted a package, and I had to add one of their patches to the non-screwed-up version. So to find the differences, I reformatted *both* versions and diffed the results. Then I could identify *what* the changes were, so I went back to my original version and applied the appropriate patch.

The reformatter was trivial: I eliminated all line breaks, then I inserted line breaks after each semicolon and comma, like so:

$ cat squidge.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp;

my $INFName = shift or die "Missing file name";
my $t = read_file($INFName);

$t =~ tr/\n\r/  /;
$t =~ s/;/;\n/g;
$t =~ s/,/,\n/g;

open my $FH, '>', $INFName . ".out" or die;
print $FH $t, "\n";
[download]

Then I used GNU diff, telling it to ignore whitespace differences and such:

If you're just trying to identify files that differ, this might do the trick for you.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.