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8. Interactive Merging with sdiff

With sdiff, you can merge two files interactively based on a side-by-side ‘-y’ format comparison (see section Showing Differences Side by Side). Use ‘-o file’ or ‘--output=file’ to specify where to put the merged text. See section Invoking sdiff, for more details on the options to sdiff.


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8.1 Specifying diff Options to sdiff

The following sdiff options have the same meaning as for diff. See section Options to diff, for the use of these options.

 
-a -b -d -i -t -v
-B -I regexp

--ignore-blank-lines  --ignore-case
--ignore-matching-lines=regexp  --ignore-space-change
--left-column  --minimal  --speed-large-files
--suppress-common-lines  --expand-tabs
--text  --version  --width=columns

For historical reasons, sdiff has alternate names for some options. The ‘-l’ option is equivalent to the ‘--left-column’ option, and similarly ‘-s’ is equivalent to ‘--suppress-common-lines’. The meaning of the sdiff-w’ and ‘-W’ options is interchanged from that of diff: with sdiff, ‘-w columns’ is equivalent to ‘--width=columns’, and ‘-W’ is equivalent to ‘--ignore-all-space’. sdiff without the ‘-o’ option is equivalent to diff with the ‘-y’ or ‘--side-by-side’ option (see section Showing Differences Side by Side).


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8.2 Merge Commands

Groups of common lines, with a blank gutter, are copied from the first file to the output. After each group of differing lines, sdiff prompts with ‘%’ and pauses, waiting for one of the following commands. Follow each command with <RET>.

e

Discard both versions. Invoke a text editor on an empty temporary file, then copy the resulting file to the output.

eb

Concatenate the two versions, edit the result in a temporary file, then copy the edited result to the output.

el

Edit a copy of the left version, then copy the result to the output.

er

Edit a copy of the right version, then copy the result to the output.

l

Copy the left version to the output.

q

Quit.

r

Copy the right version to the output.

s

Silently copy common lines.

v

Verbosely copy common lines. This is the default.

The text editor invoked is specified by the EDITOR environment variable if it is set. The default is system-dependent.


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