Windows XP Pocket Reference

Name

File Compare (fc) — \windows\system32\fc.exe

Synopsis

File Compare (fc.exe) compares the contents of two files (or more, using wildcards), and displays the differences (if any). If the files are identical, fc.exe will report FC: no differences encountered. If the files are different, fc.exe lists the differing lines. To compare two files, type fc bill.txt marty.txt. The output will look something like this:

Comparing files Bill.txt and Marty.txt
***** Bill.txt
Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
***** Marty.txt
Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the antihistamines
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
*****

For each line or sequence of lines that is found to differ in the two files, fc.exe prints out a pair of excerpts from each file. The first and last line in each excerpt are what the two files have in common, and are included for context. The lines in between (only a single line in this example) show the differences. The syntax for fc.exe is as follows:

fc file1 file2 [/a] [/b] [/c] [/lbn] [/n] [/t] [/w] [/off] [/nnn]

The options file1, file2, /c, and /off and are the same as those for File Compare (comp), discussed previously.

Option	Description
/a	Display only first and last lines for each set of differences, as opposed to the default of every different line.
/b	Treat the files as binary and perform the comparison on a byte-by-byte ...