GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 522529
Supporting list of colon-separated files to compare on command line
Last modified: 2009-08-15 18:40:50 UTC
+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #522521 +++ Our SCM tools spits out a list of file pairs to a diff tool on the command line such as the following: difftool : file1.orig file1.new : file2.orig file2.new We'd like to use meld as the main diff tool for our SCM tools but it doesn't yet support this. I'm proposing we add a command line flag that would support this. I came up with '--p4' as name for the flag but that is certainly open to suggestions. (Note: The original bug submission did not support the colons which I was recently informed was a better way for our tool to supply these files from a perforce CL)
Created attachment 107324 [details] [review] Patch created by svn diff against r980. Adds support for parsing colon-separated list of files. This patch adds a command line option --p4 that enables support for parsing a colon-separated list of files to diff. Example: meld : a b : c d : e f g : h i
Is this type of command-line usage standard and/or supported for other diff-tools. Sounds like it would trivial to roll a few-line wrapper script around meld (or any other tool) that took a colon-sep list and spawned the command for each set.
I agree with Daniel here - it's better to keep vc specific magic like this in a wrapper script.