Spiff compares the contents of file1 and file2 and prints a description of the important differences between the files. White space is ignored except to separate other objects. Spiff maintains tolerances below which differences between two floating point numbers are ignored. Differences in floating point notation (such as 3.4 3.40 and 3.4e01) are treated as unimportant. User specified delimited strings (i.e. comments) can also be ignored. Inside other user specified delimited strings (i.e. quoted strings) whitespace can be significant.