How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal

also How to use Beyond Compare at the Command Line (CLI) or How to use Beyond Compare with scripts

At the command line, the usual way to run Beyond Compare is

in Windows: bcomp.exe @nameofmyscript.bc somefile.txt otherfile.txt

in Linux or Mac: bcomp @nameofmyscript.bc somefile.txt otherfile.txt

The easiest procedure is to go to Scooter's support page and shop around for a script that seems similar. Here is a four line script, followed by the syntax for running it in Windows.

.In the example above, the ampersand is used to continue a long command on the next line. The first line tells what we want to do (make a report of the differences in something), the second line is the report format, the third line says that we want the report to print to a text file called wipe.out. The fourth line "tigers1 <--> tigers2" indicates we have made this comparison before so the file specifics are in a saved session done earlier in the Beyond Compare GUI.

Here is a five line script, followed by the syntax for running it in Linux.

In the example above we use %1, %2 to pass in command line arguments, in this case, the folders to be compared.

One general caveat for command line scripting of Beyond Compare: not all features from the GUI are possible as a script. BC was built to be a GUI program. The scripting is a tiny subset of the BC GUI commands.

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