The term ‘diff’ is shorthand for ‘difference’. The ‘diff’ command displays the differences between two files. It is integrated into ‘svn’ (the Subversion client) to display the differences between two revisions of a particular file, or between the latest revision on the server and any changes made to your working copy.

The ‘svn diff’ command is the best way to create a patch to send to the Xfce developers for inclusion in a future version of Xfce. The preferred form is a ‘unified diff’, which can be created by using the ‘svn diff’ command or by passing the ‘-u’ option to the ‘diff’ command.

Here is an example of how you would create a unified diff using the svn diff command:

maximilian@r200x:~/svn/xfce$ svn diff > xfce.patch

This command will create a patch with all the changes you made to the po files inside the “xfce” projects subfolders.