Meld is an actively-developed, open-source GUI-based diff utility targeted at developers. It is free It runs on Linux GNU License 40+ posts tagged as meld on Stack Overflow. Actively developed through February 2013 (the time of this posting) Allows two and three way comparison between files and folders Supports Subversion, Git, and Mercurial
I believe that diff -u oldfile newfile > a.patch is used to create patch files, although some other switched may be thrown in as well (-N?). Edit: OK, 4 years later and finally going to explain what the switches mean: -u creates a Unified diff. Unified diffs are the kind of diffs that the patch … Read more
Try this: diff -Naur dir1/ dir2/ The -u option makes the output a little easier to read. The -r option recurses through all subdirectories The -N and -a options are really only necessary if you wanted to create a patch file.
How to change default diff tools You can specify an external diff tool by modifying the file map, in “c:\program files\rational\ClearCase\lib\mgrs” The WinMerge suggested by Paul actually modifies that file. Each map line has 3 parts: the CC filetype, the CC action, and the application. Find the section in the map file for text_file_delta file … Read more
I think there are multiple algorithms supported because none of the algorithms are clearly the best choice in all cases. The differences are in readability of the patch output and processing time needed to generate the patch. Summarizing, this is what I understand the differences are: Myers: The original algorithm as implemented in xdiff (http://www.xmailserver.org/xdiff-lib.html … Read more
This header is called set of change, or hunk. Each hunk starts with a line that contains, enclosed in @@, the line or line range from,no-of-lines in the file before (with a -) and after (with a +) the changes. After that come the lines from the file. Lines starting with a – are deleted, … Read more
I’m using vimdiff. Or there is also sdiff.
I just had this same problem – lots of advice on how to half do it. Well, here is what I did to get both the patching and unpatching to work: To Create the Patch File: Put copies of both directories in say /tmp, so we can create the patch file, or if brave, get … Read more
diff has some options that can be useful to you: -E, –ignore-tab-expansion ignore changes due to tab expansion -Z, –ignore-trailing-space ignore white space at line end -b, –ignore-space-change ignore changes in the amount of white space -w, –ignore-all-space ignore all white space -B, –ignore-blank-lines ignore changes whose lines are all blank So diff -w old … Read more
Use the –strip-trailing-cr option: diff –strip-trailing-cr file1 file2 The option causes diff to strip the trailing carriage return character before comparing the files.