CLI Reference > Configuration Management Commands > si difffiles
  
si difffiles
compares the differences between two text files
Synopsis
si difffiles [--context=value] [--[no]ignoreBlanks] [--[no]ignoreCase] [--[no]ignoreWhitespace] [--guiCharacterEncoding=value] [(-?|--usage)] [(-F file|--selectionFile=file)] [(-N|--no)] [(-Y|--yes)] [--[no]batch] [--cwd=directory] [--forceConfirm=[yes|no]] [(-g|--gui)] [--quiet] [--settingsUI=[gui|default]] [--status=[none|gui|default]] file1 file2
Description
si difffiles compares the differences between two text files. This is useful when you want to compare the differences between two arbitrary text files (not members or revisions).
In graphical mode where the -g or --gui option is used, this invokes a dialog box that allows you to browse for each file. The results appear in Visual Difference.
* 
The dialog box keeps track of the last 10 files in both fields.
Options
This command takes the universal options available to all si commands, as well as some general options. See the options reference page for descriptions.
--context=value
shows value number of lines of context, before and after each difference between two files. si difffiles marks lines removed from the first specified file with -, marks lines added to the second specified file with +, and marks lines changed in both files with !
--[no]ignoreBlanks
controls whether to ignore blanks when comparing text files. When --ignoreBlanks is used, all differences involving blanks are ignored except blanks at the start of a line. These are treated differently than blanks between other characters. The following pair would be considered different, for example, because of the leading blank:
a b c def
a b c def
--[no]ignoreCase
controls whether to ignore case when comparing files.
--[no]ignoreWhitespace
controls whether to ignore white space at the end of each line (except the newline) and treat all consecutive strings of white space elsewhere in a line as equivalent (effectively, reducing all strings of white space to a single space for the purpose of comparing lines).
--guiCharacterEncoding=value
specifies the character encoding to use for the revision contents in the GUI, and can only be specified with the -g option. Windchill RV&S automatically decodes UTF-8 revision contents based on the presence of a byte order mark (BOM) in the file. You can set character encoding preferences for each view and command through your client preferences. The preference setting is used if the character set cannot be determined through the file’s BOM, or if no character set is specified in the command line. By default, the character set in the preferences matches the default character set provided by the client’s operating system locale. The option does not apply to pure CLI output, or third party merge and/or differencing tools. Possible values are:
UTF-8
US-ASCII
windows-1252
ISO-8859 -1
ISO-8859 -15
IBM437
IBM850
IBM863
EUC-JP
Shift_JIS
x-euc-jp-linux
x-eucJP-Open
x-windows-iso2022jp
IBM862
ISO-8859-8
ISO-8859-9
file1 file2
identifies the two files you want to compare.
Diagnostics
See the diagnostics reference page for possible exit status values.
Preferences
Using si setprefs or si viewprefs, you are able to set or view the preference keys for this command.
See Also
Commands: si diff, si ci, si merge, si mods, si revisioninfo, si rlog, si updaterevision, si viewrevision
Miscellaneous: ACL, diagnostics, options, preferences