There are plenty of paid-for utilities on Apple Mac OSX which compare files and folders.
What many people do not know is that Apple give you an excellent tool for free, part of Dev Tools.
Install Dev Tools, or download it, and look for /Developer/Applications/Utilities File Merge.
Not only can you put files into the two windows, you can put in folders as well.
Click 'compare', a new window opens and after a few minutes you'll get a listing.
Items in grey means that folder/file is identical, items in black means there is a difference.
To see how the files/folders differ click an item and you get message at the bottom of the window.
- “added to right” - the file/folder is only in the folder on the right
- "added to left" - the file/folder is only in the folder on the left
To make it easier to see what is different you can use the Exclude boxes in the upper right.
28 comments:
Trick doesn't work with non-ASCII files :(
Hey good find. I forgot all about the developer tools.
This absolutely DOES work for non-ascii files. I just compared a directory and a CD-ROM full of zip files.
Thanks for this tip!
Glad people find this useful - I know _I_ do!
Cheers!
Fab stuff, stumbled across this in my search for some sort of compare software yesterday, just tried it out and it works just fine for me. Thanks :D
great tip
thanks so much
Thanks for this. It saved me a lot of time given firstly that I already had the Developer software loaded and secondly it was easy to use.
Cheers
peetj...
Glad this works so well for everyone
QT
I'm new to mac and want to compare my picture library for any duplicates. Where can you download these or is it already installed as part of Leopard? Thanks!
Hi.
You need the Developer Tools DVD. If you can't find it you can get it from Apple http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html. The Xcode tools includes the Dev tools.
HTH
QT
Thanks this helped me with a program from a book that wasn't working and I compared my code with the code from their website and it was completely different than the book. Proved I wasn't crazy and their book was filled with mistakes.
Thanks for the tip. That is just what I need. I don't have to buy Araxis Merge or Deltopia now. :D
useful, and free... can't beat that!
Thank you very much!
I have two csv files: "prospects" and "clients". I have to do a mailing to prospects but I need to eliminate the prospects who have become clients. So, I need to compare the two files and create a third file which is prospects -(minus) clients. I can find the overlap with filemerge, which is very helpful in itself, but I haven't figured out how to avoid manually deleting the common names from prospects. Any ideas? Anyway, thank you very much for turning me on to this useful tool
Thank you for pointing to File Merge.
It worked fine for me.
Best,
Uwe
Thanks a lot...! Saved me lots of time...
:-P
Ciao,
Salva
Thanks for the heads up!
Is it possible to use FileMerge to compare pages documents? Any guidance is appreciated!
how did you install dev tools
thank you for this!
I have been searching for a third party app to use for Dreamweaver.
I hope it works for me tonight!
;)
Thanks a ton. Very helpful.
@riegal >http://developer.apple.com
This is a great post, but Apple just put a great new tool up called DeltaWalker. It's free and can be found here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/deltawalker.html
Is there any way to compare files regardless of folder structure? For example, I have totally rearranged the way I structure my pictures folder, and I want to compare all the files on my primary drive to the files on my backup drive to make sure that all the FILES are still the same, even if they are in different folders.
Any ideas?
J. Stafford - you have a funny (not in a good way) definition of "free". Shareware is not free.
Thank you to QuiteTall for this helpful post - I was just wondering what to do and stumbled here :) Still very useful I'd say...
OMG I LOVE YOU. Thanks so much this is AWESOME! Now I am going to go make a sandwich with all the time this app saved me.
Very nice, thanks for posting.
I can highly recommend DiffMerge, which is also free but seems more powerful than FileMerge
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25426/diffmerge
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