Glossary

CR

Carriage Return

A Carriage Return character (\n), generally used as part of a CRLF line ending.

CRLF

Carriage Return, Line Feed

A Carriage Return character followed by a Line Feed (\r\n), generally used as a line ending on DOS/Windows-based systems.

LF

Line Feed

A Line Feed character (\n), generally used as a line ending on UNIX-based systems, or as part of a CRLF line ending.

Unified Diff

Unified Diffs

A more-or-less standard way of representing changes to one or more text files. The standard part is the way it represents changes to lines, like:

@@ -1 +1,3 @@
 Hello there
+
+Oh hi!

The rest of the format has no standardization. There are some general standard-ish markers that tools like GNU Patch understand, but there’s a lot of variety here, so they’re hard to parse. For instance:

--- readme    26 Jan 2016 16:29:12 -0000        1.1
+++ readme    31 Jan 2016 11:54:32 -0000        1.2

--- readme    (revision 123)
+++ readme    (working copy)

--- a/readme
+++ b/readme

This is one of the problems being solved by DiffX.