How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal

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.

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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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