cmp: a pedestrian yet very fast file comparator

CMP compares two files byte by byte

CMP compares two files byte by byte employing a speed and memory optimized engine.
if the files do not match, CMP prints/returns the position and the numerical and ASCII character representation of the first differing byte and its ten neighbors.

performance:

% create a file with 80 megabytes of random data
fnam='cmp_test.mat';
tmat=rand(1,10*2^20);
save(fnam,'tmat');
clear tmat;
tic;
r=cmp(fnam,fnam,'-b','-s');
toc
delete(fnam);

% wintel systems:
% 1) p5/1.6ghz/512mb/win2k/r2007a
% > elapsed time = 3.7021 seconds
% 2) p5/2.6ghz/512mb/winxp/r2007a
% > elapsed time = 2.1013 seconds
% 3) c2.2*2.4ghz/2gb/winvista/r2007a
% > elapsed time = 1.0190 seconds

see
> help cmp
and the screen shot for more information about this self-explanatory snippet and its few options.