Question

Which option is used with cmp command to display a detailed list of mismatches?

(a) -a

(b) -b

(c) -f

(d) -l

The question was posed to me in an internship interview.

This interesting question is from Comparing Files:comm, cmp and diff Command in section Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

The correct answer is (d) -l

To explain: cmp command by default only displays the first mismatch that occurs in both files. For a detailed list of all the mismatches, we use the -l option. It prints byte position and the byte value for all differing bytes.