PMAT-DIFF(1p)

💖 PMAT-DIFF 💖

okay bestie, so this is pmat-diff from the User Contributed Perl Documentation collection — and yeah it lives in section 1p of the manual, but honestly it's just here to spill the tea on your SVs 🫖✨

✨ NAME ✨

pmat-diff — prints you a lil list of the SVs that are unique to each of two given files 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

$ pmat-diff test-1.pmat test-1-after.pmat

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so you hand it two .pmat files and it compares them, fr fr. It prints a list of SVs unique to each one, plus a count of the ones it found common to both 👑

lowkey important though: this is only useful if the two files were generated by the same process, usually at similar times. Think: either side of a memory leak test as created by Test::MemoryGrowth. iykyk.

For each file, the SVs unique to it get gathered up into a forest of trees by reference 🌈🌲 — because in typical usage patterns it usually ends up that several SVs are all referenced by one container, and that's just the vibe. And when you're out here tracking down memory leaks, it often helps to focus on those outer containers rather than the inner SVs they contain. main character containers only, no cap 💅

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk> — iconic, we stan 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this beauty is rocking perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-21, and it's the PMAT-DIFF(1p) moment. go forth and diff those SVs ✨💖