re-binary-diff

MCP server for read-only binary comparison: a unified diff between two files, and a per-section fingerprint of one file. Dry-run only — the server never writes a byte to disk.

Why

The 2026-06-05 stress test surfaced a need to compare an original binary against a patched copy (the Output/.../patches/ workflow) without re-introducing the on-disk patch primitive. re-binary-diff is the read-only cousin: it reports the diff, it never applies it.

Tools

Tool	What it does
check_binary_diff	Health check — re-binary-diff has no system deps; always status: OK
unified_diff	Run difflib.unified_diff over the byte streams of two files (or, if too large, hash their chunks) and return a structured diff
fingerprint_sections	Return per-chunk SHA-256 + offset + size for a single file (a structural fingerprint, like re-lief.normalize_for_diff but at chunk granularity)

Install

Part of the RE-AI plugin; ./install.sh installs the package. To install standalone:

pip install -e ./servers/re-binary-diff

Run

re-binary-diff                              # stdio transport (default for MCP)
python -m re_binary_diff                    # equivalent