Dif vs. Diff

Difnoun

difference

Diffnoun

(slang) difference

‘A peach and an apricot? What's the diff?’;

Dif

Dif is a settlement divided between Kenya's Wajir County and Somalia's Lower Juba region.

Diffnoun

(computing) Any program which compares two files or sets of files and outputs a description of the differences between them.

Diffnoun

(computing) The output of a diff program. A diff file.

Diffnoun

(medicine) nodot=1: differential of types of white blood cell in a complete blood count.

Diffnoun

(rock climbing) A difficult route.

Diffverb

To run a diff program on (files or items) so as to produce a description of the differences between them, as for a patch file.

Diffverb

To compare two files or other objects, manually or otherwise.

Diffproper noun

(computing) A program, historically part of the Unix operating system, which compares two files or sets of files and outputs a description of the differences between them.

Diff

In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other.