diffoscope command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

diffoscope: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: diffoscope: command not found

Solutions to diffoscope: command not found

How To Fix diffoscope: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu diffoscope is provided by diffoscope-minimal package.

diffoscope-minimal is:

diffoscope is a visual diff tool that attempts try to get to the bottom of what makes files or directories actually different.

It can recursively unpack archives of many kinds, transforming various binary formats into more human-readable form to compare them in a human-readable way. It can compare two tarballs, ISO images or PDFs just as easily. The differences can be displayed on the console or in a HTML report.

File formats supported include: Android APK files, Android boot images, Apple Xcode mobile provisioning files, ar(1) archives, ASM Function, Berkeley DB database files, bzip2 archives, character/block devices, ColorSync colour profiles (.icc), Coreboot CBFS filesystem images, cpio archives, Dalvik .dex files, Debian .buildinfo files, Debian .changes files, Debian source packages (.dsc), Device Tree Compiler blob files, directories, ELF binaries, ext2/ext3/ext4/btrfs/fat filesystems, Flattened Image Tree blob files, FreeDesktop Fontconfig cache files, FreePascal files (.ppu), Gettext message catalogues, GHC Haskell .hi files, GIF image files, Git repositories, GNU R database files (.rdb), GNU R Rscript files (.rds), Gnumeric spreadsheets, GPG keybox databases, Gzipped files, Hierarchical Data Format database, ISO 9660 CD images, Java .class files, Java .jmod modules, JavaScript files, JPEG images, JSON files, LLVM IR bitcode files, LZ4 compressed files, macOS binaries, Microsoft Windows icon files, Microsoft Word .docx files, Mono ‘Portable Executable’ files, Mozilla-optimized .ZIP archives, Multimedia metadata, OCaml interface files, Ogg Vorbis audio files, OpenOffice .odt files, OpenSSH public keys, OpenWRT package archives (.ipk), PDF documents, PE32 files, PGP signatures, PGP signed/encrypted messages, PNG images, PostScript documents, Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) files (version #7), Python .pyc files, RPM archives, Rust object files (.deflate), Sphinx inventory files, SQLite databases, SquashFS filesystems, symlinks, tape archives (.tar), tcpdump capture files (.pcap), text files, TrueType font files, U-Boot legacy image files, WebAssembly binary module, XML binary schemas (.xsb), XML files, XMLB files, XZ compressed files, ZIP archives and Zstandard compressed files.

This -minimal package only recommends a partial set of the supported 3rd party tools needed to produce file-format-specific comparisons, excluding those that are considered too large or niche for general use.

diffoscope is developed as part of the Reproducible Builds project.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install diffoscope-minimal

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install diffoscope-minimal.

sudo apt -y install diffoscope-minimal

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install diffoscope-minimal

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix diffoscope command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.