PrestoSoft Community

I'm sure this has been asked and answered dozens of times, but I can't find it.

I need to compare all files in directories. That's easy enough. But the output I want is a listing of all the changes for all the files. What I find are lists of changed files, or I can do individual file compares and see side by side differences for the entire file.

Again... I'm looking for a listing of only the changes in all the files

Thanks in advance for the help.

Mark

Sorry... resubmitting with notify on

In order to output both directory comparison results and file diffs you need to use command line with the /f option and save results to a file or output to the console (using the /o option)

Think I am looking for the same thing, but not getting what I expect.

Looking for command line to recursively document the diff's in all files and directories, using the unix diff format, sending output to a file.
Command Line I am trying is:

>ExamDiff dir1 dir2 /f /c /o:rv-060210.txt /dn1:superman /dn2:robin /r2 /c //

I tried with and without the "/c" option

It is only giving me a file listing of what changed, not the text of what was changed, deleted or added.

Looking to get output similar in context to :
File | Report | View | Save Diff File

Additionally the /dn1 and /dn2 options do not seem to work

Thank you,

Rick

rvlahov wrote:It is only giving me a file listing of what changed, not the text of what was changed, deleted or added.

For the text to be displayed, Full File Comparison needs to be turned on for the current session under Options | Dir Comparison. Alternatively, you can turn on Full File Comparison in the command line by disabling the currently enabled "Consider" options (For example, "/!s /!ic /!y /!u /!z /!dc /!dv" will force all such options to be disabled for the current comparison.)

rvlahov wrote:Additionally the /dn1 and /dn2 options do not seem to work

The /dn1 and /dn2 options are not meant to control how directories are displayed in output but only in the ExamDiff Pro window itself.

Apologies for resurrecting this topic.

I started EDP, compared two directories with full file comparison, but when I generate a report, it does not contain any individual file differences.

What is missing?

I'm not sure but it sounds as if you ran a comparison in GUI and then created a report form it. This is not going to work: you need to use the command line (see the whole thread).

This seems like a strange restriction.

I'll use this opportunity to request this functionality to be accessible from the UI as well.

We have already in the wish list a request to "Create directory comparison HTML diff report with links to file comparison HTML diff reports". It's not currently planned for the next release.

I am talking about the text diff, not the HTML diff.
It should be easier to implement since the functionality already exists.

While it is easier to implement than in HTML, there's still a usability issue: in order to generate such report EDPro would have to recompare the directories, which might take considerable amount of time, longer than the original comparison: file differences have to be collected. Hence we prefer the user to explicitly specify the option for file details as a command line switch.

True, however, please consider the alternative:

A user select 2 directories in Windows Explorer and compares them, looks at some differences and then decides to generate a diff report based on what they saw.

They now have to:
1. Open a command-line window
2. Remember or find where EDP is installed, if not in the path
3. Remember or look-up the EDP parameters, in particular turn off all the "consider" options
(Something like: "C:\Program Files\ExamDiff Pro\ExamDiff.exe" path-of-dir1 path-of-dir2 /f /o:diff.txt /!s /!ic /!y /!u /!z /!dc /!dv)

It still takes the same time to re-compare the directories, but this time using a cumbersome manual process, so the usability is even worse.

The options to view the differences in the UI and to generate a report should not be mutually exclusive! In my opinion, that is a much more serious usability issue.

Best regards,
Alex.

It's a reasonable request. We'll add the following to the wish list (along with your presumed vote):

Ability to generate detailed diff report (with file differences, like with the /t command line option) from the directory comparison GUI.

thank you!