Edit diff files

Question

I have a .diff file created when comparing two directories. However, there are some folders and files that appear in .diff that I want to remove from it, so I can get a cleaner .diff .

Is there any editor that allows me to do this (something like Kompare, but it should allow me to delete files from diff)? How can I specify to exclude specific directories?

Answer 1

This is not an editor, but it looks like this: the filterdiff from patchutils does what you after:

Filterdiff will select the parts of the patch file that apply to files matching (or, alternatively, not matching) a shell pattern.

You can learn more about patchutils here and is packaged in Debian / Ubuntu as "patchutils".

Answer 2

If you need to do "real editing" of the patch (diff) files, for example, adding and removing differences, adding and removing lines from diff, etc., then you might consider starting Emacs , which has a diff editing mode that does " the right thing "when you switch the diff file. It has menu actions and key bindings for “kill the current piece” and similar actions.

Answer 3

Have you tried Meld ? There you can define filters to filter your comparisons. Otherwise, it is the perfect GUI for diff.

Answer 4

If you have control over the creation of the .diff file, I believe that the best approach is, first of all, to not include what you later want to ignore. Diff has a command line parameter --exclude-from=FILE , where you can tell it a list of all the files you want to exclude. Alternatively, you can use --exclude=PATTERN to exclude based on file name matching.