Yeah, I tend to use this for test that have a few hundred lines of output, which are useful for testing the final results of a system. For example, I often generate complete HTML pages to make sure everything in a Web application has worked properly.

One trick that's nice is if I know what's changed, I can see if there are any differences besides that with some shell cleverness. For example, if I've added an output field called some_thing to my test file, and the only thing that should have changed is the addition of that one field, I can run something like:

  diff -u <(grep -v some_thing test1.test) test1.ok
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