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(diff.info)White Space

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Suppressing Differences in Blank and Tab Spacing
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   The `-b' and `--ignore-space-change' options ignore white space at
line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more white space
characters to be equivalent.  With these options, `diff' considers the
following two lines to be equivalent, where `$' denotes the line end:

     Here lyeth  muche rychnesse  in lytell space.   -- John Heywood$
     Here lyeth muche rychnesse in lytell space. -- John Heywood   $

   The `-w' and `--ignore-all-space' options are stronger than `-b'.
They ignore difference even if one file has white space where the other
file has none.  "White space" characters include tab, newline, vertical
tab, form feed, carriage return, and space; some locales may define
additional characters to be white space.  With these options, `diff'
considers the following two lines to be equivalent, where `$' denotes
the line end and `^M' denotes a carriage return:

     Here lyeth  muche  rychnesse in lytell space.--  John Heywood$
       He relyeth much erychnes  seinly tells pace.  --John Heywood   ^M$