Re: Use meld to diff a list of files

[Svein Seldal <sveinse seldal com>]

On 03/15/2013 09:20 PM, Kai Willadsen wrote:
> I think you want the --diff command line argument, which launches a
> tab for a two or three-way comparison. You can give Meld this argument
> as many times as you like, and all of the comparisons will be launched
> in tabs in a single window.

I just tried it with --diff, but it generates too many tabs for any 
reasonable sized list.

What I'd like to have is a directory view with the list I provide meld, 
and let the user pick the files to view diff on. This list is coming 
from python already, so I can access the meld classes directly if I have to.

The reason I do this is because I need a tool for comparing root file 
systems. Meld is perfect for visualising the differences, but it has 
some features which spoils my usage. Meld seems to follow symlinks, 
which pollutes melds output and it might end up comparing the wrong file 
(e.g. a symlink pointing out of the file system). I know you can disable 
symlinks alltogether, but that isn't what I need either. And then you 
have special files (blk, chr, fifo and sockets).

I understand that this functionality is outside meld's scope, so I wrote 
my own directory diff program in Py. It compares two directory trees and 
it compares the metadata of files, e.g. link content/data instead of 
following the link, blk/chr dev major/minor compare. For ordinary files 
it just compares sizes and sha1 hashsums. If not equal I'd like to 
display the diff in meld.


Best regards,
Svein Seldal