An Algorithm for Differential File Comparison

By J. W. Hunt, M. McIlroy. 2008

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

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Detecting repackaged smartphone applications in third-party android marketplaces (2012, background): “, diff [20], on these two manifest files and their corresponding class files can easily identify such repackaging behavior.”
Neural Edit Completion (2020, methodology): “Naïvely, differencing of programs can be performed by treating code as text and using text-diff algorithms for line differencing [Hunt and McIlroy 1975] or inline differencing [Birney et al. 1996].”
Visual comparison for information visualization (2011, methodology): “For instance, the UNIX tool diff was developed in the early 1970s [70] and outputs line-by-line difference of two files.”
NICAD: Accurate Detection of Near-Miss Intentional Clones Using Flexible Pretty-Printing and Code Normalization (2008, methodology): “The details of the algorithm are described elsewhere [17, 16], here we only provide an example of what it does and how it helps in finding clones.”
High-performance content-based phishing attack detection (2011, methodology): “The base algorithm for diff is a fast implementation of the longest common subsequence problem that was originally developed by Douglas McIlroy [20].”
Privacy oracle: a system for finding application leaks with black box differential testing (2008, background): “One may wonder whether the popular diff utility [5] may work as well as or even better than NetDialign for comparing two application messages.”