Man pages for diff suggest no solution for colorization from within itself. Please consider using colordiff. It’s a wrapper around diff that produces the same output as diff, except that it augments the output using colored syntax highlighting to increase readability:
diff old new | colordiff
or just:
colordiff old new
Installation:
- Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get install colordiff - OS X:
brew install colordifforport install colordiff