How to use file and path filters

[psguru]

Version 3.2 allows to set up file and path filters to include/exclude files in directory comparison.

If you want to exclude a file (or a subdirectory in non-recursive comparison), and you know its exact name, you don't have to use wildcards. So if you want to exclude file "abc.txt", you can use this exact filter. You may, however, want to exclude something like "ab*.txt".

Now, you are in recursive comparison mode, and you know exactly the path you want to exclude, you should use that exact path (e.g. for file "c:\sub\xyz\abc.txt" the following filter should be used: ":c:\sub\xyz\abc.txt" -- note the ":" ). This, however, rarely happens: usually you'd want to exclude based on some part of the path, such as one the subdirectories. Hence, if you want to exclude all files that belong to "c:\sub\xyz" folder (assuming that you compared "c:\sub" folder with some other folder), that means that you want to exclude all files whose path contains "xyz", hence ":*xyz*" notation.

[clwilson]

I like the path matching but it is somewhat limited as it is implemented. Sometimes I compare some fairly large directory trees (several thousand files). After I have done the compare I find that there are a lot of sub folders I would like to ignore when printing out the diff report. Now I have to add these in the dir comparison setting and redo the compare. This could requre several iterations if I don't get all the subfolders correct the first time and this takes time. It would be nice if this path filtering could also be done in the view filter. This way I don't have to recompare thousands of files each time. Would this be a problem to implement.

[psguru]

Directory comparison view filters always use full paths. So for instance, if you want to exclude all files that are located in "dir1" folder, use the following file path filter in View Filter:

dir1\*