When doing recursive diffs I want to ignore expected differences/translations - is there a way to do that with standard unix tools? E.g. file1: 1 ... 2 /path/to/something/ver1/blah/blah 3 /path/to/something/ver1/blah/blah 4 ... file2: 1 ... 2 /path/to/something/ver2/blah/blah 3 /path/to/something/ver3/blah/blah 4 ... I want to be able to do something like: diff file1 file2 --ignore-transltion "ver1>ver2" This should show only show me that line 3 is different Does anyone know of a good way to do that? I can easily write a perl script to do it but i will end up re-implementing most of the rest of the functionality of 'diff'. Update: My goal is to run this on directories with different versions of the same files with "diff -r" so I can spot unexpected differences in versions.