I've got two partition images (A and B) and want to use them to create a patch that I can apply on A on another computer in order to get the new B image without flooding the network. I have the following requirements:
- works on Linux
- can create diffs
- can use diffs to patch files
- can handle binary files
- can handle large files (a few hundred GB should work)
- no user interaction required (just a console application)
- ideally, should be able to read from/write to pipes (so that I can pipe into it from a gzip-compressed file and write to one)
Does something like that exist?
Best Answer
You should probably take a look at the rsync-related tools: rdiff and rdiff-backup. The
rdiff
command lets you produce a patch file and apply it to some other file.The
rdiff-backup
command uses this approach to deal with entire directories, but I'm guessing you're working with single-file disk images, sordiff
will be the one to use.