I do a lot of hacking with binary files at work, and simply doing a diff to check if two files are the same isn't really useful, I usually want to preprocess the file with some command to make it into useful plain text. This ends up being quite tedious by hand. I came up with this simple script, diffcmd, but I'm sure the lazyweb will let me know of anything better if it exists.
Usage: % diffcmd "readelf -a" file1 file2
#!/bin/sh CMD=$1 FILE1=$2 FILE2=$3 TMP1=`tempfile` TMP2=`tempfile` $CMD $FILE1 > $TMP1 $CMD $FILE2 > $TMP2 diff -u $TMP1 $TMP2 rm $TMP1 $TMP2