A tool to compare archives of various file types, e.g. tar, zip or directories. The main use-case for this tool was to clean up various compressed archives used as backup. Since the file types differed between the archives it was not feasible to simply use the diffing capabilities of tools like tar.

The tool is written in Python and computes the diff by comparing file hashes. It also includes a function to strip prefix paths from the output, i.e. the leading directory name present for all files. For most archive types no explicit extraction of the entire archive is necessary, as the files can be read one-by-one. This lends itself to efficient in-memory processing.

Code on GitHub.