Question

How can we skip some initial bytes from both the files to be compared?

(a) using -b option

(b) using -n option

(c) using -l option

(d) using -i option

I have been asked this question during an online exam.

Query is from Comparing Files:comm, cmp and diff Command topic in portion Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

Right choice is (d) using -i option

To elaborate: We can skip the number of initial bytes to be compared from both the files such that the cmp command will not consider that number of bytes while comparing both files. For this facility, we use -i option followed by the number of bytes to be skipped. For example, to skip the first 10 bytes use the following command,