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5.2 Differences with wdiff ¶

Even if mdiff is meant to fully support wdiff, options have been shuffled around so mdiff could better merge both diff and wdiff options in a common scheme. diff habits were almost always favored in this option reorganisation.

wdiff2 is now a mere front-end to mdiff that only rewrites the options. The following notes apply.

• Some options are just transmitted unchanged, these are -1, -2, -3 and -i.
• Option -c also gets turned into -i, to be compatible with wdiff versions up to ‘0.4’.
• Simple option -a in wdiff becomes -A in mdiff, -l becomes -k, -n becomes -m, -p becomes -o, -s becomes -v and -t becomes -z.
• Options introducing strings, which are -w, -x, -y and -z in wdiff, respectively become -Y, -Z, -Q and -R in mdiff.
• Options -C, -h and -v are processed directly by wdiff and are not transmitted to mdiff.
• Further, the -C option of wdiff has no equivalent in mdiff.
• A new option -q inhibits the message which explains how mdiff might have been directly called.
• The option --diff-input (-d) from wdiff isn’t supported by wdiff2 (yet).