Options to diff3

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Options to diff3

The following is a summary of all of the options that GNU diff3 accepts. Multiple single letter options (unless they take an argument) can be combined into a single command line argument.

'-a'
Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they do not appear to be text. See Binary Files and Forcing Text Comparisons.

'-A'
Incorporate all changes from older to yours into mine, surrounding all conflicts with bracket lines. See Marking Conflicts.

'-e'
Generate an ed script that incorporates all the changes from older to yoursinto mine. See Selecting Which Changes To Incorporate.

'-E'
Like '-e', except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first and third files. See Marking Conflicts. With '-e', an overlapping change looks like this:

<<<<<<< mine
lines from mine
=======
lines from yours
>>>>>>> yours

'--ed'
Generate an ed script that incorporates all the changes from older to yours into mine. See Selecting Which Changes To Incorporate.

'--easy-only'
Like '-e', except output only the non-overlapping changes. See Selecting Which Changes to Incorporate.

'-i'
Generate 'w' and 'q' commands at the end of the ed script for System V compatibility. This option must be combined with one of the '-AeExX3' options, and may not be combined with '-m'. See Saving the Changed File.

'--initial-tab'
Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format. This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal. See Preserving Tabstop Alignment.

'-L label'
'--label=label'
Use the label, label, for the brackets output by the '-A', '-E' and '-X' options. This option may be given up to three times, one for each input file. The default labels are the names of the input files. Thus 'diff3 -L X -L Y -L Z -m A B C' acts like 'diff3 -m A B C', except that the output looks like it came from files named 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' rather than from files named 'A', 'B' and 'C'. See Marking Conflicts.

'-m'
'--merge'
Apply the edit script to the first file and send the result to standard output. Unlike piping the output from diff3 to ed, this works even for binary files and incomplete lines. '-A' is assumed if no edit script option is specified. See Generating the Merged Output Directly.

'--overlap-only'
Like '-e', except output only the overlapping changes. See Selecting Which Changes To Incorporate.

'--show-all'
Incorporate all unmerged changes from older to yours into mine, surrounding all overlapping changes with bracket lines. See Marking Conflicts.

'--show-overlap'
Like '-e', except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first and third files. See Marking Conflicts.

'-T'
Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format. This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal. See Preserving Tabstop Alignment.

'--text'
Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they do not appear to be text. See Binary Files and Forcing Text Comparisons.

'-v'
'--version' Output the version number of diff3.

'-x'
Like '-e', except output only the overlapping changes. See Selecting Which Changes To Incorporate.

'-X'
Like '-E', except output only the overlapping changes. In other words, like '-x', except bracket changes as in '-E'. See Marking Conflicts.

'-3'
Like '-e', except output only the nonoverlapping changes. See Selecting Which Changes To Incorporate.