TARDIFF(1) General Commands Manual TARDIFF(1)

tardiff —
compute binary delta between tar files

tardiff [-p] [-m mtree] oldtar newtar delta

The tardiff utility finds differences between two tar files, oldtar and newtar, and creates a delta archive at delta.

The delta archive, which is usually much smaller than the new tar file, can be used with tarpatch(1) to transform a directory tree from the old tar file's content to the new tar file's content. The delta archive additionally contains a manifest to verify that the old and new trees are correct.

The following options are supported:

mtree
Specify a relative path inside the old and new archives where an mtree(1) file describing the tree resides. This is necessary for NetBSD distribution sets, which do not create all the parent directories, but have embedded mtrees at etc/mtree/set.⟨name⟩. If you set the -m option to tardiff, make sure to pass the same option to tarpatch(1) too.
Print progress bars to standard error.

BSDIFF
bsdiff(1) program.
MTREE
mtree(1) program.
TAR
tar(1) program. Note: Must be bsdtar.

bsdiff(1), mtree(1), tar(1), tarpatch(1)

tardiff does not support file names with any funny business like spaces, newlines, shell metacharacters, etc.

The embedded mtree file cannot record its own SHA-256 hash, and tarpatch(1) has no corresponding -m option, so there is no way for tarpatch(1) to verify the old or new mtree before or after applying the delta.

January 5, 2021 NetBSD 9.1_STABLE