Compare

Compare is a binary file compare utility with features that are a significant improvement over the "fc" command that ships with Windoze. Compare is a Win32 console mode (command line) application that uses Memory Mapped file I/O for increased performance. Unlike "fc", Compare handles wildcards properly, and will recurse subdirectories. With "fc", the output you get from comparing multiple files scrolls off the screen before you can make any sense out of it. Compare allows you to specify what results you want to see, and displays them as compactly as possible. A simple summary is displayed at the end to tell you how many files were identical, and how many weren't. Performance-wise, compare is about 15% faster than fc.

A version of compare is also available for Linux.

compare was originally written to verify the integrity of data written to CD-R media. Since then, CD cutting tools usually provide a verify feature although there are still some that do not. Lately, I've been using compare to verify the integrity of hard-drive to hard-drive copies that I make when upgrading operating systems.


Compare version 0.7 in action.

Special requirements

Download

Known Problems

Windows 95 not supported
I coded this using a few calls that are only available in Windows 98 and up. Shame on me! Need to fix that one day. Should be very easy to fix.

Comparing a file to itself.
compare happily compares a file with itself. It should instead print an error message to warn the user that they may not be comparing what they think they are comparing.

Numerous options are not implemented.
This is an alpha release. It works really well, but I intend to add a few features before beta and final.

Windows ERRORLEVEL reporting is not as advertised.
I need to fix this. I think it currently works like this:

Status

Windows version is FreeWare. Source will be available and GPL-ed when I get around to it. Bug me if you really want it.

Linux version is open source, GPLv3+. Feel free to send me patches.

Links

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Copyright ©2011, Ted Felix