Question

If we are interested in knowing that whether the two files are identical or not, we can use ___ command.

(a) comm

(b) diff

(c) cmp

(d) differ

I have been asked this question in unit test.

I'd like to ask this question from Comparing Files:comm, cmp and diff Command topic in section Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

The correct choice is (c) cmp

To elaborate: All the three commands comm, diff and cmp are used for comparing files but if we are interested in knowing whether two files are identical or not we can use comm command without any option. It will simply return the prompt without displaying any output if both the files are identical.