Saturday, 5 January 2008

Apple Mac OSX, Compare Files and Folders

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.
Posted by at 04:39
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25 comments:

  1. Hans7 June 2008 at 07:52

    Trick doesn't work with non-ASCII files :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. John13 June 2008 at 07:37

    Hey good find. I forgot all about the developer tools.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fawkes22 June 2008 at 12:47

    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!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Steve Mansfield22 June 2008 at 14:14

    Glad people find this useful - I know _I_ do!

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Heather7 August 2008 at 23:37

    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

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous19 December 2008 at 06:52

    great tip

    thanks so much

    ReplyDelete
  7. peetj24 December 2008 at 03:28

    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...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Steve Mansfield24 December 2008 at 05:33

    Glad this works so well for everyone

    QT

    ReplyDelete
  9. d_MatthewS_b24 December 2008 at 07:54

    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!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Vinson Ravenell22 February 2009 at 14:56

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Joe Lee25 June 2009 at 02:47

    Thanks for the tip. That is just what I need. I don't have to buy Araxis Merge or Deltopia now. :D

    ReplyDelete
  12. Steve Mansfield25 June 2009 at 04:58

    useful, and free... can't beat that!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Igal23 July 2009 at 11:14

    Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous30 October 2009 at 01:19

    Thank you for pointing to File Merge.

    It worked fine for me.

    Best,
    Uwe

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous30 October 2009 at 05:02

    Thanks a lot...! Saved me lots of time...
    :-P

    Ciao,
    Salva

    ReplyDelete
  16. jai4 December 2009 at 15:02

    Thanks for the heads up!

    Is it possible to use FileMerge to compare pages documents? Any guidance is appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
  17. riegal6 March 2010 at 02:20

    how did you install dev tools

    ReplyDelete
  18. erikbriones8 April 2010 at 06:50

    thank you for this!

    I have been searching for a third party app to use for Dreamweaver.

    I hope it works for me tonight!

    ;)

    ReplyDelete
  19. DavidDelMonte14 April 2010 at 20:18

    Thanks a ton. Very helpful.

    @riegal >http://developer.apple.com

    ReplyDelete
  20. J Stafford25 May 2010 at 07:47

    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

    ReplyDelete
  21. aaron1 June 2010 at 00:46

    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?

    ReplyDelete
  22. Anonymous15 June 2010 at 17:32

    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...

    ReplyDelete
  23. Shalzers25 October 2010 at 16:56

    This post has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Shalzers25 October 2010 at 16:56

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Anonymous17 October 2011 at 16:49

    Very nice, thanks for posting.

    ReplyDelete

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