What is the Windows equivalent of the diff command

Question

I know that there is a post similar to this   here  I tried using the comp command like it mentioned  but if I have two files  one with data like  abcd  and the other with data  abcde   it just says the files are of different sizes  I wanted to know where exactly they differ  In Unix  the simple diff tells me which row and column  the comp command in windows works if I have something like  abd  and  abc   Not otherwise  Any ideas what I can use for this

User · Answer

If you have installed git on your machine  you can open a git terminal and just use the Linux diff command as normal

User · Answer

Winmerge has a command line utility that might be worth checking out   Also  you can use the graphical part of it too depending on what you need

User · Answer

fc   fc is better at handling large files    4 GBytes  than Cygwin s diff

User · Answer

FC works great by in my case it was not helpful as I wanted just the lines that are changed  And FC give additional data like file name  same lines and bilateral comparison         gt fc data txt data txt bak              DATA TXT         09         09         09           DATA TXT BAK         09         08         09   but in my case I wanted only the lines that have changed and wanted those lines to be exported to different file  without any other header or data    So I used  findstr  to compare the file    findstr  V  G data txt bak data txt  gt DiffResult txt   where    data txt bak is the name of old file   data txt is the name of new file  DiffResult txt contains the data that is changed i e just one line     09

User · Answer

The reason you getting the error with COMP is that the utility assumes the files that you are comparing are of the same size  To overcome that you can use th   n  option with which you can specify the number of lines you want to compare   see the options supported by comp by typing  comp     on the command line  so your command would look like     C   gt comp  filepath1   filepath2   a  l  n  the number of lines you want to compare   c    This should solve your problem if you wanna stick to using COMP  But this will be a problem for really large files   Though comp is an option  but I feel it is primitive and FC is a better option  you can use FORFILES and FC together to probably make a really good filecompare utility if you require one on a frequent basis   FC is used this way for ref   C   gt fc  c case insensistive   lbn number of errors allowed before you wanna stop compare   n display line number   filename1   filename2    there are many options available which you can see by  fc     hope this helps

User · Answer

The windows equivalent to the diff command is the fc  File Comapre  command    Here are the basic steps to do so   1  Keep the two files in a folder  Example file1 html and file2 html   2  Launch command prompt  3  Type fc file1Location file2Location    Have found a detailed tutorial on the same   http   www howtogeek com 206123 how-to-use-fc-file-compare-from-the-windows-command-prompt

User · Answer

Well  on Windows I happily run diff and many other of the GNU tools  You can do it with cygwin  but I personally prefer GnuWin32 because it is a much lighter installation experience   So  my answer is that the Windows equivalent of diff  is none other than diff itself

User · Answer

Run this in the CMD shell or batch file   FC file1 file2   FC can also be used to compare binary files   FC  B file1 file2

User · Answer

I ve found a lightweight graphical software for windows that seems to be useful in lack of diff command  It could solve all of my problems   WinDiff  http   www grigsoft com download-windiff htm

User · Answer

I don t know if the following tool is exatly what you need  But I like to use  for specific files  some online tool  This way I can use it regardless of the operational system  Here is a example  diffchecker com  But for my needs  I guess the best tool to track changes and logs of my project s files is GIT  If you work in a team  you can have some repo online in a server of yours  or use it with Bitbucket or Github   Hope it helps somebody

User · Answer

DiffUtils is probably your best bet  It s the Windows equivalent of diff   To my knowledge there are no built-in equivalents

User · Answer

Another alternative is to download and install git from here  Then  add the path to Git bin  to your PATH variable   This will give you not only diff  but also many other linux commands that you can use from the windows command line    You can set the PATH variable by right clicking on Computer and selecting Properties  Then you can click on Advanced System Settings on the left side of the screen  In the pop up  click Environment Variables and then either add or update the PATH variable in your user variables with Git bin   Git diff documentation

User · Answer

There s also Powershell  which is part of Windows    It ain t quick but it s flexible  here s the basic command   People have written various cmdlets and scripts for it if you need better formatting   PS C  Users Troll gt  Compare-Object  gc  file1   gc  file2    Not part of Windows  but if you are a developer with Visual Studio  it comes with WinDiff  graphical   But my personal favorite is BeyondCompare  which costs  30

[windows] What is the Windows equivalent of the diff command?

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