There are two methods of producing file diffs in
Perforce, either against local
changes that have not been submitted yet, or between two trees
(or within a branch) in the depot. These are done with
different commands, diff and
diff2:
p4 diffThis generates a diff of the local changes to files in
the edit state. The -du and
-dc flags can be used to create unified
or context diffs, respectively, or the
P4DIFF environment variable can be set to a
local diff command to be used instead. It is a very good
idea to use this command to review your changes before
submitting them.
p4 diff2This creates a diff between arbitrary files in the
depot, or between files specified in a branch spec. The
diff operation takes place on the server, so
P4DIFF variable has no effect, though the
-du and -dc flags do
work. The two forms of this command are:
%p4 diff2 -bbranchname
and
%p4 diff2 //depot/path1//depot/path2
In all cases the diff will be written to the standard
output. Unfortunately, Perforce
produces a diff format that is slightly incompatible with the
traditional Unix diff and patch tools. Using the
P4DIFF variable to point to the real diff(1)
tool can help this, but only for p4 diff.
The output of diff2 command must be
post-processed to be useful (the -u flag of
diff2 will produce unified diffs that are
somewhat compatible, but it does not include files that have
been added or deleted). There is a post-processing script at:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/tools/tools/perforce/awkdiff?view=co.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <[email protected]>.
Send questions about this document to <[email protected]>.