There are many utilities (diff, comm) but, by far, the best way in my opinion is to use kdiff and Midnight Commander, two excellent pieces of software. You must insert this in your ~/.mc/menu file:

k       kdiff left_file right_file         kdiff %d/%f %D/%F

Now, when you press F2 and k in Midnight Commander, kdiff will be launched automatically, comparing the two current files from Midnight's panels. Isn't that great? (you must be under X-windows to do this) Of course, you could be using kdiff by itself, but then you will have to do the extra work of loading the two files (I prefer using the keyboard)

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