Newbe Dev Stack

Answer : Meld (alternative link) Meld is a visual diff and merge tool. You can compare two or three files and edit them in place (diffs update dynamically). You can compare two or three folders and launch file comparisons. You can browse and view a working copy from popular version control systems such such as CVS, Subversion, Bazaar-ng and Mercurial. Look at the screenshots page for more detailed features. I like diffuse: Diffuse is a graphical tool for merging and comparing text files. Diffuse is able to compare an arbitrary number of files side-by-side and gives users the ability to manually adjust line-matching and directly edit files. Diffuse can also retrieve revisions of files from Bazaar, CVS, Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Monotone, Subversion, and SVK repositories for comparison and merging. gvimdiff is handy for quick comparisons. Install gvim to get it.

Answer : Have a look at at File comparison tools, from which I am using WinMerge. It has an ability to compare XML documents (you may wish to enable DisplayXMLFiles prefilter). DisplayXMLFiles.dll - This plugin pretty-prints XML files nicely by inserting tabs and line breaks. This is useful for XML files that do not have line returns in convenient locations. See also my feature comparison table. I wrote and released a Windows application that specifically solves the problem of comparing and merging XML files. Project: Merge can perform two and three way comparisons and merges of any XML file (where two of the files are considered to be independent revisions of a common base file). You can instruct it to identify elements within the input files by attribute values, or the content of child elements, among other things. It is fully controllable via the command line and can also generate text reports containing the differences between the files. There are a few Java-bas...

Answer : I don't know if paid software can be recommended, but after testing a lot of free tools, I finally decided to go for Beyond Compare. Meld was my previous choice but abandonned it due to instabilities during merging of very large folders. There are plenty of tools for this, here are a few with a GUI: xxdiff Meld * beediff KDiff3 * Diffuse * fldiff * They all do pretty much the same thing, but the first two possibly offer the best user experience. Those with an asterisk are available from the Software Centre. If you like Winmerge very much and would like to continue to use it in Ubuntu like me, you can do that by using Wine Windows Program loader to install Winmerge and run the program. It runs very well for me. I find none of the above GUI tools that come with Ubuntu to be as good as Winmerge. Maybe I am too biased for Winmerge :-)

Answer : You should probably take a look at the rsync-related tools: rdiff and rdiff-backup . The rdiff command lets you produce a patch file and apply it to some other file. The rdiff-backup command uses this approach to deal with entire directories, but I'm guessing you're working with single-file disk images, so rdiff will be the one to use. xdelta can do everything you want. Fair warning though, if your images aren't very similar, you can end up with a very large patch, because xdelta uses half of the defined memory buffer for finding differences. More information is available at the TuningMemoryBudget wiki page. Increasing the buffer size may help out quite a bit. bsdiff is another option, but it's very RAM hungry and completely inappropriate for anything the size of a disk image. bsdiff is quite memory-hungry. It requires max(17*n,9*n+m)+O(1) bytes of memory, where n is the size of the old file and m is the size of the new file. bspatch ...