Topic summary
Diff utility
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Diff.
History
The original diffutility was developed in the early 1970s for the Unix operating system, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was part of the 5th Edition of Unix released in 1974, and was written by Douglas McIlroy, and James Hunt. This research was published in a 1976 paper co-written with James W. Hunt, who developed an initial prototype of diff. The algorithm this paper described became known as the Hunt–Szymanski algorithm.