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To understand the report, remember that diff is prescriptive, describing what changes need to be made to the first file (file1) to make it the same as the second file (file2).

Specifically, the d in 1d0 means delete and the a in 2a2 means add.

Thus:

• 1d0 means line 1 must be deleted in file1 (apples). 0 in 1d0 means line 0 is where they would have appeared in the second file (file2) had they not been deleted. That means when changing file2 to file1 (backwards) append line 1 of file1 after line 0 of file2.
• 2a2 means append the second line (oranges) from file2 to the now second line of file1 (after deleting the first line in file1, oranges switched to line 1)