Did you try writing your own line comparison routine and pasing it into File::Compare::compare_text?

Check out perldoc File::Compare.

use File::Compare qw (compare_text);

sub one_space {

    $line1 = shift;
    $line2 = shift;

    $line1 =~ s/\s+/ /g;
    $line2 =~ s/\s+/ /g;

    return $line1 ne $line2;
}

if (compare_text ('spaces.txt', 'more_spaces.txt', \&one_space ) == 0)
{
    print "they're equal\n"
} else {
    print "they're different\n"
}
[download]