Araxis Merge is an advanced multiplatform merging and comparison utility. This application makes it possible for us to compare two different files, and view all the differences between them.
With this tool you can compare and merge documents, images, files, and folders. The comparison report can be saved as an Unix diff, an HTML file, an HTML slideshow, or an XML file. The report is the best part of this program and it deserves a separately mention because of its excellent quality. This report provides information about each compared files, including their names, locations, and their last modified dates. We can also view a comparison summary, plus a graphic image that displays the content of each file, and the differences between them which are clearly highlighted in red. The context-sensitive user interface is quite smart and it supports many languages and character codes. We may search and replace, print, edit, etc. It is possible to set the color of the user interface, use syntax highlighting, and much more. Although this program has two editions ( Araxis Merge Standard, and Araxis Merge Professional) there is only one free evaluation version for both of them. This fully-featured trial version corresponds to the Professional edition. This is due to the fact that the only difference between the two versions is that the Profession edition lets us compare and merge three items at a time.
Awesome! If you need to compare and synchronize files from 2 or 3 different directory trees, you need this. It is actually a developer's tool even more than a sys admin tool because of its byte-for-byte comparison capability that tracks changes between versions of the same file. I got it to try because a critical backup process had failed and time was too short to rerun the entire backup. Merge 2008 let me get things back on track in a quarter of the time. I STRONGLY recommend!