CEPH-DIFF-SORTED(8)

💖 CEPH-DIFF-SORTED 💖

okay bestie, so this is the ceph-diff-sorted manual page from section 8 (that's the sysadmin/daemon section, iykyk) — and she is niche but she is serving. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

ceph-diff-sorted — compare two sorted files line by line 🌸

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

ceph-diff-sorted file1 file2

that's it. two files. two little arguments. slay. 💅

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👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

so ceph-diff-sorted is a simplified diff utility — and the whole point of her is that she's optimized for comparing two files whose lines are lexically sorted. like, that's her entire vibe check. she needs the sortedness. it's not optional bestie, it's the assignment. ✨

the output is simplified compared to what you'd get from the standard diff tool that ships on POSIX systems. how simplified? she uses angle brackets — '<' and '>' — to show you lines that appear in one file but not the other. and listen: the output is not compatible with the patch tool. not even a little. don't try it. 💀

now why does she exist? tea time ☕ — she was created to perform diffs of large files (like, the "containing billions of lines" kind of large) that the standard diff tool cannot handle efficiently. the trick is that if you already know the lines are sorted, you can do the whole comparison efficiently with minimal memory overhead. iconic behavior honestly. no cap. 🧚

⚠️ important: the sorting of each file needs to be done lexically. most POSIX systems use the LANG environment variable to determine the sort tool's sorting order, so to sort lexically you'd need something such as:

$ LANG=C sort some-file.txt >some-file-sorted.txt

write that down. actually don't, just remember it. 🎀

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

compare two files, bestie, it's literally one line:

$ ceph-diff-sorted fileA.txt fileB.txt

that's the whole thing. go off. 🔥

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⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

when she's done, the exit status gets set to one of these lil guys — and yes, they all mean different things, so look at them:

• 0 — files same ✅
• 1 — files different 🫠
• 2 — usage problem (e.g., wrong number of command-line arguments) 🙈
• 3 — problem opening input file 😭
• 4 — bad file content (e.g., unsorted order or empty lines) 💀

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💜 AVAILABILITY 💜

ceph-diff-sorted is part of Ceph — a massively scalable, open-source, distributed storage system. yes, that Ceph. she's a whole ecosystem. 💫

please refer to the Ceph documentation at <https://docs.ceph.com> for more information. go read it, she ate. 📚

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🌸 SEE ALSO 🌸

• rgw-orphan-list <>(8)

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🎀 Copyright 🎀

2010-2014, Inktank Storage, Inc. and contributors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA-3.0). respect the license bestie, it's the rules 🫶

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and that's the page!! 💖 this one's from the dev source, version-dated Aug 19, 2026, living in section 8 as CEPH-DIFF-SORTED(8). mwah. periodt. 💅✨