Line numbers with side-by-side diff

Question

I want to write a shell script that diffs two files, and dump the result into another file.

I find sdiff to be more intuitive than just diff. However, sdiff doesn't print out the line numbers of where the differences are. I also tried vimdiff, which shows me line numbers, but I'm not sure how to dump the results into a file from a shell script.

So far, this is what I am using:

sdiff -s file1 file2

Is there a way to get side-by-side diffs with line numbers?

Answer 1

There is a very nice tool for this: meld

To install: sudo apt-get install meld

You can check differences between two or more files, also between directories.