does anyone know of any windows command line diff tools that are free? I need to compare two binary files and see if they are different or not. Im not interested in how they are different i just need to know if they are.

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up vote 7 down vote accepted

Use the comp command under cmd.exe

[C:\]comp /?
Compares the contents of two files or sets of files.                                                                    

COMP [data1] [data2] [/D] [/A] [/L] [/N=number] [/C] [/OFF[LINE]]                                                       

  data1      Specifies location and name(s) of first file(s) to compare.                                                
  data2      Specifies location and name(s) of second files to compare.                                                 
  /D         Displays differences in decimal format.                                                                    
  /A         Displays differences in ASCII characters.                                                                  
  /L         Displays line numbers for differences.                                                                     
  /N=number  Compares only the first specified number of lines in each file.                                            
  /C         Disregards case of ASCII letters when comparing files.                                                     
  /OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.                                                              

To compare sets of files, use wildcards in data1 and data2 parameters.
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The added benefit of using comp is that you know it'll work on any Windows machine without having to install anything. – dwj Sep 22 '09 at 13:44
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And there's also the fc command for a more flexible file comparison, in case there is a need for diff-like behavior. – A Dwarf Sep 22 '09 at 13:53
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To simply see if they are different, you could MD5 them. For more detailed information on differences there is GNU DiffUtils for Windows.

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