Native PowerShell equivalent of UNIX diff and patch

Question

I have a requirement to potentially patch a file on the fly as part of a script.

In order to make what the script is doing more readable I'd like to implement this in a manner similar to the UNIX "diff" and "patch" approach. On standard UNIX systems diff can generate a specially formatted text file which represents the differences between two files. This may be consumed by "patch" along with the file to modify in order to generate the changed file in a clean and straightforward way.

It appears that there is no straightforward way to do this in PowerShell. Options I've seen are to use multiple line regular expressions - which are hard to build and to interpret, consuming the whole file and processing it line by line or encoding the new file that I want to have in the script as a Base64 string and simply decoding it to the target file.

While Compare-Object looks as though it could do something to generate an appropriate diff object there appears to be no easy way to use the output of Compare-Object to apply a change to an array of strings.

Answer 1

Compare-Object is the closest thing to diff, and there's no equivalent to patch built into PowerShell. If you need that functionality I'd recommend using the Windows ports of diff and patch.