PTARDIFF(1)

💅 PTARDIFF(1) — the group chat edition ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to ptardiff, straight out of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide 🎀 — yes that guide, the one your weird uncle keeps open in a tab. this lil icon is a manual page for a smol program and honestly? she works. let's get into it 🌸

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✨ NAME ✨

ptardiff — literally just a program that diffs an extracted archive against an unextracted one. that's it, that's the whole personality. no cap 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the vibe: ptardiff is a small program that diffs an extracted archive against an unextracted one, and it does it using the perl module Archive::Tar. lowkey iconic that she outsources the heavy lifting, and honestly? valid. 👑

which means — and this is the fun part — she effectively lets you view changes made to an archive's contents. like, you edited a thing, and she's gonna show you exactly what you did. main character energy fr fr. 😭💖

here's how she eats: you provide the program with an ARCHIVE_FILE and she will look up all the files within the archive, scan the current working directory for a file with the name, and diff it against the contents of the archive. she's out here doing a whole scavenger hunt in your cwd and honestly she's obsessed with it. 🔥

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

the two moods, both valid:

ptardiff ARCHIVE_FILE
ptardiff -h

and now the whole actual workflow, which is giving before and after:

$ tar -xzf Acme-Buffy-1.3.tar.gz
$ vi Acme-Buffy-1.3/README
[...]
$ ptardiff Acme-Buffy-1.3.tar.gz > README.patch

see what happened there? you extracted, you vibed with vi, you ignored [...] like it's the boring part of the story, and then ptardiff gave you a README.patch like the little gift that she is. 🎁✨

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💜 OPTIONS 💜

• h — prints this help message. that's her whole option list and she's not sorry. one (1) single flag, zero baggage, we stan a low-maintenance queen. 🫶

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

go show these two some love, they're her inner circle:

• tar(1) — the extraction bestie
• Archive::Tar — the perl module doing all the actual work behind the scenes (iykyk) 💀

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ngl if you made it this far you're a real one. now go diff an archive, it's giving productivity 💅🌸

big kiss, this page came to you courtesy of perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-11-03, and it goes out to nobody but you, bestie 🎀✨