If you want to compare two sets of files instead of two individual files, you can use wildcards (? and *). There are two main options for the File Compare tool that you can use. Like every tool in command prompt, you will need to know how to enter your commands with the proper syntax. This is the Pathname parameter in which you will state the location of your files. There is only one parameter you will need to specify, but you will need to enter two instances of it.

/W – If you use this switch, FC will compress white space (tabs and spaces) during its comparison of your files.

/T – This switch will tell FC not to expand tabs to spaces.

This is useful if you want to prevent two files from becoming extremely out of sync.

/ nnnn – Replacing the “n’s” here will tell FC that when it finds mismatched lines, it can only continue if it finds “n” consecutive matching lines after the mismatch.

The default, if you do not specify a number is 100 lines of mismatched text.

/LB n – Replace the “n” with a number to limit the amount of consecutive different lines that FC will read before it will abort.

/N – This switch can only be used with ASCII but it will show all the corresponding line numbers.

/L – This will compare your files as ASCII text.

/U – Use this switch to compare files as Unicode text files.

/A – This switch will make FC show only the first and last lines for each group of differences.

/C – If you need to do a case insensitive comparison, use this switch./B – This switch will perform a binary comparison.

File comparison tool linux