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When managing files on a Unix-like system, it often becomes necessary to compare the contents of files — whether you're tracking changes, verifying copies, or troubleshooting configuration issues. Two invaluable commands for these tasks are diff and cmp. These utilities, while serving the broad purpose of comparing files, have distinct differences in functionality and use cases. Let’s delve deeper into each tool, explore their usage, and understand when to use one over the other. diff is a command-line utility used to compare text files line by line. It not only shows whether files differ but also provides the details of the differences in various formats.