

Beyond Compare is excellent, but KDiff3 and WinMerge are great alternatives that provide the. In Mac, when you install Xcode you get a diff tool named FileMerge, simple but sufficient in most of the cases. It can compare files, zips, photos (graphic file formats) do 3-way comparisons, work with Dropbox, … pretty sweet. This Mac app was originally developed by Scooter Software. I use it to automatically compare and then copy updates/differences every day from my important folders (financial, legal, scans, ….) to a thumb drive. They have their place (they’re great for automating processes), but nothing beats a visual for being able to quickly see what’s different between things (something in *bright red* is gonna catch your eye!). Or not.) (As a software engineer, I’ve been using grep and diff et al for a looong time. (You can geek out and get all power-usery later. It can be overwhelming at first, but if you just focus on doing simple compares, it’s fine. It’s a GUI, so easier than command lines (for most). (You can set up defined comparisons (files or folders, etc), and then automatically have things merged or updated or just compared, based on the rules you set.) I started using it just to do folder comparison, but it actually does a great job of also doing simple backups and syncing. It’s now available for OSX, Linux, and PC. I’ve been using BeyondCompare by Scooter Software ( ) for a number of years.

If you have another way that you compare folders in Mac or Windows, please leave a comment and let us know how you do it. The latter allows you to do comparisons using a GUI. WinMerge ( Figure A) is an open source package for Windows that can find duplicate files and perform merge and comparison of various text file types.
WINMERGE TOOL FOR MAC FOR MAC
I did find a discussion thread with a way to compare folders using the Windows command line, but from my research it seems like many people use the open source tool called WinMerge. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac (from their website) and Bitdefender Virus Scanner Plus (from the Mac App Store) both. DS_Store ~/Desktop/Docs ~/Docs > diff.txt open diff.txt To do that, change the command to something like this: diff -rq -x. If you have a lot of changes to view, you can redirect the results to a text file and check later at your leisure. DS_Store ~/Desktop/Docs ~/DocsĪs you can see, it displays the result in a nice easy to read format.
WINMERGE TOOL FOR MAC MAC OS X
DS_Store files that Mac OS X throws everywhere, so this was my command.

I wanted a way to exclude those annoying. In its simplest form, you type the command like this: diff -rq firstfolder secondfolder
WINMERGE TOOL FOR MAC HOW TO
I found this helpful Macworld article that shows how to compare two folders using the Terminal in Mac OS X. I am in the process of moving my paperless documents to a new location, and am taking that opportunity to clean up my folder structure a little bit.Īfter getting everything set up in the new location, I wanted a way of comparing the contents to the old directory tree to see if there are any glaring omissions/red flags.
