similarity-tester - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

sim - find similarities in C, Java, Pascal, Modula-2, Lisp, Miranda, or text files

SYNOPSIS

sim_c [ -[defFiMnpPRsSTv] -r N -t N -w N -o F ] file ... [ [ / | ] file ... ]
sim_c ...
sim_java ...
sim_pasc ...
sim_m2 ...
sim_lisp ...
sim_mira ...
sim_text ...

DESCRIPTION

Sim_c reads the C files file ... and looks for segments of text that are similar; two
segments of program text are similar if they only differ in layout, comment, identifiers,
and the contents of numbers, strings and characters. If any runs of sufficient length are
found, they are reported on standard output; the number of significant tokens in the run
is given between square brackets.

Sim_java does the same for Java, sim_pasc for Pascal, sim_m2 for Modula-2, sim_mira for
Miranda, and sim_lisp for Lisp. Sim_text works on arbitrary text and it is occasionally
useful on shell scripts.

The program can be used for finding copied pieces of code in purportedly unrelated
programs (with -s or -S), or for finding accidentally duplicated code in larger projects
(with -f or -F).

If a separator / or | is present in the list of input files, the files are divided into a
group of "new" files (before the / or |) and a group of "old" files; if there is no / or
|, all files are "new". Old files are never compared to each other. See also the
description of the -s and -S options below.

Since the similarity tester needs file names to pinpoint the similarities, it cannot read
from standard input.

There are the following options:

-d The output is in a diff(1)-like format instead of the default 2-column format.

-e Each file is compared to each file in isolation; this will find all similarities
between all texts involved, regardless of repetitive text (see `Calculating
Percentages' below).

-f Runs are restricted to segments with balancing parentheses, to isolate potential
routine bodies (not in sim_text).

-F The names of routines in calls are required to match exactly (not in sim_text).

-i The names of the files to be compared are read from standard input, including a
possible separator / or |; the file names must be one to a line. This option
allows a very large number of file names to be specified; it differs from the @
facility provided by some compilers in that it handles file names only, and does
not recognize option arguments.

-M Memory usage information is displayed on standard error output.

-n Similarities found are summarized by file name, position and size, rather than
displayed in full.

-o F The output is written to the file named F.

-p The output is given in similarity percentages; see `Calculating Percentages' below;
implies -e and -s.

-P As -p but only the main contributor is shown; implies -e and -s.

-r N The minimum run length is set to N units; the default is 24 tokens, except in
sim_text, where it is 8 words.

-R Directories in the input list are entered recursively, and all files they contain
are involved in the comparison.

-s The contents of a file are not compared to itself (-s for "not self").

-S The contents of the new files are compared to the old files only - not between
themselves.

-t N In combination with the -p or -P options, sets the threshold (in percent) below
which similarities will not be reported; the default is 1, except in sim_text,
where it is 20.

-T A more terse and uniform form of output is produced, which may be more suitable for
postprocessing.

-v Prints the version number and compilation date on standard output, then stops.

-w N The page width used is set to N columns; the default is 80.

-- (A secret option, which prints the input as the similarity checker sees it, and
then stops.)

The -p option results in lines of the form
F consists for x % of G material
meaning that x % of F's text can also be found in G. Note that this relation is not
symmetric; it is in fact quite possible for one file to consist for 100 % of text from
another file, while the other file consists for only 1 % of text of the first file, if
their lengths differ enough. The -P (capital P) option shows the main contributor for
each file only. This simplifies the identification of a set of files A[1] ... A[n], where
the concatenation of these files is also present. A threshold can be set using the -t
option; note that the granularity of the recognized text is still governed by the -r
option or its default.

The -r option controls the number of "units" that constitute a run. For the programs that
compare programming language code, a unit is a lexical token in the pertinent language;
comment and standard preamble material (file inclusion, etc.) is ignored and all strings
are considered the same. For sim_text a unit is a "word" which is defined as any sequence
of one or more letters, digits, or characters over 127 (177 octal), (to accommodate
letters such as ä, ø, etc.).
Sim_text accepts s p a c e d t e x t as normal text.

The -s and -S options control which files to compare. Input files are divided into two
groups, new and old. In the absence of these control options the programs compare the
files thus (for 4 new files and 6 old ones):
n e w / o l d <- first file
1 2 3 4 / 5 6 7 8 9 10
|------------/------------
n 1 | c /
e 2 | c c /
w 3 | c c c /
4 | c c c c /
second / / / / / / / / / / / / /
file -> 5 | c c c c /
o 6 | c c c c /
l 7 | c c c c /
d 8 | c c c c /
9 | c c c c /
10 | c c c c /
where the cs represent file comparisons, and the / the demarcation between new and old
files.
Using the -s option reduces this to:
n e w / o l d <- first file
1 2 3 4 / 5 6 7 8 9 10
|------------/------------
n 1 | /
e 2 | c /
w 3 | c c /
4 | c c c /
second / / / / / / / / / / / / /
file -> 5 | c c c c /
o 6 | c c c c /
l 7 | c c c c /
d 8 | c c c c /
9 | c c c c /
10 | c c c c /
The -S option reduces this further to:
n e w / o l d <- first file
1 2 3 4 / 5 6 7 8 9 10
|------------/------------
n 1 | /
e 2 | /
w 3 | /
4 | /
second / / / / / / / / / / / / /
file -> 5 | c c c c /
o 6 | c c c c /
l 7 | c c c c /
d 8 | c c c c /
9 | c c c c /
10 | c c c c /

The programs can handle UNICODE file names under Windows. This is relevant only under the
-R option, since there is no way to give UNICODE file names from the command line.

LIMITATIONS

Repetitive input is the bane of similarity checking. If we have a file containing 4
copies of identical text,
A1 A2 A3 A4
where the numbers serve only to distinguish the identical copies, there are 8 identities:
A1=A2, A1=A3, A1=A4, A2=A3, A2=A4, A3=A4, A1A2=A3A4, and A1A2A3=A2A3A4. Of these, only 3
are meaningful: A1=A2, A2=A3, and A3=A4. And for a table with 20 lines identical to each
other, not unusual in a program, there are 715 identities, of which at most 19 are
meaningful. Reporting all 715 of them is clearly unacceptable.

To remedy this, finding the identities is performed as follows: For each position in the
text, the largest segment is found, of which a non-overlapping copy occurs in the text
following it. That segment and its copy are reported and scanning resumes at the position
just after the segment. For the above example this results in the identities A1A2=A3A4
and A3=A4, which is quite satisfactory, and for N identical segments roughly 2 log N
messages are given.

This also works out well when the four identical segments are in different files:
File1: A1
File2: A2
File3: A3
File4: A4
Now combined segments like A1A2 do not occur, and the algorithm finds the runs A1=A2,
A2=A3, and A3=A4, for a total of N-1 runs, all informative.

Calculating Percentages
The above approach is not suitable for obtaining the percentage of a file's content that
can be found in another file. This requires comparing in isolation each file pair
represented by a c in the matrixes above; this is what the -e option does. Under the -e
option a segment File1:A1, recognized in File2, will again be recognized in File3 and
File4. In the example above it produces the runs
File1:A1=File2:A2
File1:A1=File3:A3
File1:A1=File4:A4
File2:A2=File3:A3
File2:A2=File4:A4
File3:A3=File4:A4
for a total of ½N(N-1) runs.

TIME AND SPACE REQUIREMENTS

Care has been taken to keep the time requirements of all internal processes (almost)
linear in the lengths of the input files, by using various tables. If, however, there is
not enough memory for the tables, they are discarded in order of unimportance, under which
conditions the algorithms revert to their quadratic nature.

The time requirements are quadratic in the number of files. This means that, for example,
one 64 MB file processes much faster than 8000 8 kB files.

The program requires 6 bytes of memory for each token in the input; 2 bytes per newline
(not when doing percentages); and about 76 bytes for each run found.

EXAMPLES

The call
sim_c *.c
highlights duplicate code in the directory. (It is useful to remove generated files
first.) A call
sim_c -f -F *.c
can pinpoint them further.

A call
sim_text -e -p -s new/* / old/*
compares each file in new/* to each file in new/* and old/*, and if any pair has more that
20% in common, that fact is reported. Usually a similarity of 30% or more is significant;
lower than 20% is probably coincidence; and in between is doubtful.

A call
sim_text -e -n -s -r100 new/* "|" old/*
compares the same files, and reports large common segments. (The | can be used as a
separator instead of / on systems where the / as a command-line parameter gets mangled by
the command interpreter.)

Both approaches are good for plagiarism detection.

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