Talk:Comparison of file comparison tools

Table Comments

Table Enhancements

I'd like to see a column added that indicates the programs ability to synchronize files. I believe Beyond Compare can do this for example. Also while the table could be improved I found it useful to know what the various programs are, the costs, licensing, and key features and versions etc. HEnnulat (talk) 21:54, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Agruments for Axing the table

• Documents

  What documents? HTML documents can be compared by all the utilities.

• Binary (display) Hexadecimal

  All the utilities can be made to do these. Pipes.

  Not true at all! Pdev3

• Tables

  All the utilities can compare tables in all the file formats they can handle.

• Metadata

  Seriously? What is this supposed to mean?

• Graphics

  All utilities can compare at least three types of graphics files.

  Not true at all! Pdev3

If done properly, this table would wind up containing only lots of yesses. Axe it. Shinobu 21:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

(Proposed merge: see talk:file comparison) Shinobu 12:02, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

@Pdev3: that you don't know how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact the things you tagged with "Not true at all!" are quite easy to do. Shinobu 16:17, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Capability of non-standard-latin characters not mentioned

What tool does correctly compare files that have non-standard-latin characters in the name or a folder above? Windiff is ignoring any folder containing any non-latin character, and files are reported unaccessible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.102.189.110 (talk) 17:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Rows missing

The three tables are not the same length. Some of the programs added in the first table are not present in the two other table. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.243.165.186 (talk) 12:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

• Unless my eyes played tricks on me, I normalized all of the tables to contain the same row-headers in the left-hand column. This means that some rows in some tables are empty (i.e., all grey). Being empty and present hopefully will motivate people to fill-in missing values better than complete absence of the row. —optikos (talk) 15:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

CSV diff tools

Same remark as the one related to xml diff tools below: it would be interesting to list wich tools can compare 2 dimensional arrays, eg: compare spreadsheets, csv files. csvdiff is listed and can do that, but maybe there are other tools. --Norz (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Miscellaneous

Would be useful to know which tools can handle large volumes of data without needing memory for each file processed (even if no differences were found). I need to compare directories with terabytes of data (millions of files). Even DirDiff on the Amiga could do this (and still can, in the emulation), but every tool I tried on Windows runs out of memory because it seems to allocate memory for each file it processes.

I am looking for a File- and Directory-Tree Comparer for MacOS before X... Please don't let fall that under the table! Thanks!!

Suggestion: addition of samefile to tables. (203.87.122.227 01:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC))

Need info on handling document formats!

One of the important features is the ability to handle .doc files, .xml files, etc. Many lack ability to handle these (unless you consider treating a .doc file as an opaque binary file, or an xml file as a structureless text file, "handling" them -- obviously noone seriously counts that). Pdev3

There is no realy need to compare .doc files with an external program, since Word does a much better job at comparing them, automatically flagging inserted and deleted text with the appropriate authors and dates.

Haha, perhaps you have never tried to merge directories with multiple files (much less directories with hundreds or thousands of files). If you are just doing small work on one document, you are in a small, happy world, yes, but, unfortunately, some are not...

And note that for any "real" work (at least those kinds of real work where diffing is important, i.e. work where files are interchanged between different people) you shouldn't use .doc files. Word's .doc is not an interchange format. [1]

Comparing xml files as text actually works quite well, especially if you pipe them through a normalizer before the comparison. Shinobu 10:42, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Haha, again, I suspect you have only done small work with one or two files. I bet if you had to deal with real live data, changing and many directories, you'd start to get interested in tools that could wrap up the xml normalization for you.

The number of files to be compared is not really relevant. Just iterate through your files and pipe them trough the normalizer to the diff utility. If you're lazy, you can write a shellscript or similar utility that does exactly what you want in less than the time needed to figure out what "professional" tool to use and to install it. A similar solution will exist for Word (and it will probably yield better results, since it will automatically play nice with Word's revision control model). Shinobu 19:43, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

XML Diff Tools

Does anyone have any pointers to XML diff tools? Should we create a seperate page for XMTL diff tools? Thanks --Dan 16:06, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

There is an XML::Diff Perl library. -- Beland 20:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Altova DiffDog is one...it is listed in the first table, but not the features tables.--Ericjs 15:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Non-linear ?

What does non-linear refer to? Is it to do with the time required to compute the diff? Gary van der Merwe ^(Talk) 09:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

This question has still not been answered - I've looked at the sites for the tools that are marked as supporting non-linear compare; none of those sites made any reference to the term. Doing a Google search for "non-linear compare" and "nonlinear compare" didn't seem to turn up anything relevant in the first few pages of results. I'd like to propose that this comparison criterion is removed from the list. -- 203.206.161.248 (talk) 03:37, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Seconded: I wrote one of these tools and don't know what it means! 87.198.170.2 (talk) 10:40, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

• The column-header for this column was sloppy terminology. "Sublinear" poorly tried to refer to whether the most-microscopic unit of reporting a difference was a line or something smaller than a line, such as a token between whitespaces or a character. The oblique terminology has been replaced with direct terminology that is clear to understand. Please fill in for the respective products of which you have intimate knowledge. —optikos (talk) 13:46, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Filters

Tools than can compare a set of files can typically exclude file names matching a pattern from comparison. This is called "filtering" by some.

However, some tools also provide the possibility to ignore changes in a comparison. For example differences in white space, uppercase/lowercase, or even any line matching a regular expression. The latter is quite useful for excluding automatic keywords inserted by version control systems like CVS, SVN or SourceSafe. Amongst the few tools I know this feature is provided by GNU diff, meld and WinMerge.

So I suggest to add another table, called "filters to ignore changes". Column "Character casing" of table "Aspects" would move there. Additional columns are "white space" and "regular expressions".

-- Alba7 09:25, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

large files

There should be a column about the maximaum lenght of a file (most tools unly support up to 2GB) and how large files are scanned (if both files are loaded into memory as a whole, like in windiff amd winmerge, the maximum file lenght is theoretically only half of the system-memory (in reality less, because some memory is used by the OS and the app istself) and if the application is 32bit, it is also limited to 1GB, because this is the maximum, most x86-OSes can assign to x32-tasks. This problems can be avoided, by only storing the differences in he memory and if there arre too many differences, it would be possible to store the differences in a temporary file). --MrBurns (talk) 00:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

p4merge

Can anyone provide justification for the p4merge license being 'free for personal use'? The tool itself, though it comes with the perforce visual client, when installed alone has no license agreement at all. The perforce website states that you can use downloads for any reason provided you do not modify the software. Dsav (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC).

I've changed the license to 'freeware' since this directly contradicted the Perforce website --Dsav (talk) 01:01, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Video / Audio Comparison

There is no software in the list to compare two video files or audio files to show which file is the correct one (i.e. storage or download was not 100% correct). The software should show and play the part when they are different). Who know such software and can complete the list? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.173.95.85 (talk) 09:05, 15 April 2010 (UTC)