Where did "sdiff" go in Ventura?

[Morac]

After upgrading from Monterey to Ventura on my MacBook Air, I found that sdiff terminal command was just gone. What's odd is that the man page for it still exists, but the executable is gone. I ended up installing diffutils to get it back, but I have no idea why it was removed.

Was it removed for others too?

 

[joevt]

Yes, sdiff command doesn't exist but its man page does. Strange.

I've never used sdiff. What does it do that the side-by-side option of diff doesn't?

The sdiff and diff commands in Monterey have man pages with a date of 2002. The man pages in Ventura are 2022 for diff and 2017 for sdiff and they have many differences.

 

[lcubed]

did the default sh change between monterey and ventura?

 

[Morac]

I've never used sdiff. What does it do that the side-by-side option of diff doesn't?

I never used side by side in diff, but sdiff has a number of formatting options that I use to compare logs I keep.

did the default sh change between monterey and ventura?

No, it’s still zsh.

 

[rtphokie]

Is sdiff part of the base MacOS build? Or is it something that you've previously installed that got wiped out by the Ventura upgrade?

This solved it for me:

brew install diffutils

 

[haralds]

I just compared /usr/bin with the Monterey version. Monterey has 1010 items in that folder, Ventura 933. Apple decided to trim it together with other commands. Alas, it is not part of the brew repo.
I just copied it from Monterey, but it is killed on execution.

 

[Morac]

I just compared /usr/bin with the Monterey version. Monterey has 1010 items in that folder, Ventura 933. Apple decided to trim it together with other commands. Alas, it is not part of the brew repo.
I just copied it from Monterey, but it is killed on execution.

It’s part of brew. It’s in diffutils.