binary file compare...

[Martin]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:03 PM, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid> wrote:
> On 2009-04-13, SpreadTooThin <bjobrien62 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I want to compare two binary files and see if they are the same.
>> I see the filecmp.cmp function but I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling
>> that it is doing a byte by byte comparison of two files to see if they
>> are they same.
>
> Perhaps I'm being dim, but how else are you going to decide if
> two files are the same unless you compare the bytes in the
> files?

I'd say checksums, just about every download relies on checksums to
verify you do have indeed the same file.

>
> You could hash them and compare the hashes, but that's a lot
> more work than just comparing the two byte streams.

hashing is not exactly much mork in it's simplest form it's 2 lines per file.

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testfile.data bs=1M count=5
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
5242880 bytes (5.2 MB) copied, 1.4491 s, 3.6 MB/s
$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testfile2.data bs=1M count=5
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
5242880 bytes (5.2 MB) copied, 1.92479 s, 2.7 MB/s
$ cp testfile.data testfile3.data
$ python
Python 2.5.4 (r254:67916, Feb 17 2009, 20:16:45)
[GCC 4.3.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import hashlib
>>> sha = hashlib.sha256()
>>> sha.update(file("testfile.data").read())
>>> sha.hexdigest()
'a0a8b5d1fd7b8181e0131fff8fd6acce39917e4498c86704354221fd96815797'
>>> sha2=hashlib.sha256()
>>> sha2.update(file("testfile2.data").read())
>>> sha2.hexdigest()
'25597380f833f287e8dad936b15ddb616669102c38f54dbd60ce57998d99ad3b'
>>> sha3=hashlib.sha256()
>>> sha3.update(file("testfile3.data").read())
>>> sha3.hexdigest()
'a0a8b5d1fd7b8181e0131fff8fd6acce39917e4498c86704354221fd96815797'
>>> sha.hexdigest() == sha2.hexdigest()
False
>>> sha.hexdigest() == sha3.hexdigest()
True
>>> sha2.hexdigest() == sha3.hexdigest()
False
>>>



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