fcmp - compare file identity

A small shell util that compares files for identity with mmap() and memcmp().

Usage

fcmp produces no output, but success is indicated by its return code.

$ fcmp file1 file2 && echo "Equal!"

You can pass any number of files, but at least 2 must be provided.

Code	Meaning
0	The files are equal
1	The files are unequal
2	The files have unequal lengths, and therefor must be unequal
-1	There was an error

You can use this in shell scripts easily:

# Example

if fcmp "$1" "$2"; then
    echo "Files are equal!"
else
    echo "Files are not equal!"
fi

Building

To build normally, run make.

Release target

Build with default optimisations using make release, it will output a stripped binary at fcmp-release.

Notes

• The Makefile uses variables RELEASE_CFLAGS and RELEASE_LDFLAGS to apply optimisations (and DEBUG_CFLAGS + DEBUG_LDFLAGS for extra compiler flags with the debug target). If needed you can set these yourself to prevent the defaults.
• The default OPT_FLAGS specify -march=native which may be undesireable for you. Set the variable or modify the Makefile if you need to remove this.

PGO

Building with Profile Guided Optimisation is supported with the pgo Makefile target. It uses the same rules as the release target and outputs a binary to fcmp-pgo.

There may be small performance improvements from using this target instead of release, but the difference is mostly negligable.

Debug target

Build with debugging information and no optimisations using make debug, it will output a binary at fcmp-debug.

Notes

• Before switching between targets, make sure to run make clean.
• GCC + Graphite compiler specific optimisation flags are added by default with the OPT_FLAGS variable. Override this variable if using another compiler that doesn't support these optimisations.

Multithreading

• By default, parallel processing is enabled when building through libpthread, to build a single-threaded version override the variables FEAT_CFLAGS and FEAT_LDFLAGS to empty.
• By default the program will decide at runtime whether or not to use parallelised processing. You can set FEAT_CFLAGS="-D_RUN_THREADED=1" to force the use of a parallelised run every time in the binary, although this is not recommended.
• Performance gains from parallelised runs mostly appear with a large number of files being compared at once, as the task delegation overhead is surpassed.

License

GPL'd with <3