CMP Release 5.23
Compare Text or Binary Files

What is CMP?

CMP is a file comparison program for text or binary files. Inspired by UNIX diff, it makes a greatly enhanced replacement for the DOS utilities COMP and FC. CMP displays the differences between two files, or between two series of files, even entire subdirectory trees.

Option settings let you affect the comparison process, such as whether to treat A-Z and a-z as the same and whether to ignore different runs of spaces and tabs. Other options let you control the output format and amount of information reported. You can tune the look-ahead and resync values for different sets of files, which will give you the most useful difference reports.

CMP gives you complete flexibility in batch programing and setting up makefiles. You can configure CMP to return various values according to whether differences were found or all files were the same.

16-bit and 32-bit versions are supplied together, with an interactive program tour. The 16-bit version runs under pretty much any version of DOS or Windows; the 32-bit version runs in a DOS box (also known as command prompt) under Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

The full user guide (116 KB) can be viewed on line and is included in the download package.

How do I get CMP?

You may download the program, all docs, and the interactive tour as a 174 KB ZIP file from garbo. (If a link leads to the wrong place, please let me know before complaining to the archive.) After downloading, unzip it in any convenient directory and read the 0README.1ST file.

This free download is intended for you to try the program. If you continue using it after your 30-day trial, you’ll want to pay for it. As an incentive, the registered version has a couple of extra features.

Need an unzip program? Two excellent choices are UNZIP by Info-ZIP (freeware) for DOS and WinZip (shareware) for Windows.

How do I buy CMP?

CMP is shareware. Download it gratis and try it out for 30 days. Pay for it if you decide to keep using it; otherwise just delete it from your computer.

Price: US $15.00 for single license; quantity discounts and site licenses are available.

Payment methods: PayPal or register by postal mail.

Upgrades: Under the license terms, there is no additional charge for upgrades. When releasing an upgrade, we send a notice to every registered user at the e-mail in our records. Please make sure we have your current address!

What’s new?

These are just the most significant changes in the last few releases. Complete release notes for each release are in the download file.

Release 5.23 handles directory paths of any length by allocating all path strings dynamically. (Previously, CMP relied on the compiler constant _MAX_PATH = 259 characters, but one user has a disk with longer paths than that.)

Releases 5.21 and 5.22 were private releases to the customer who reported the problem.

Release 5.2:

• The new /J option tells CMP to report just the lines that were present in one file and absent from the other.
• The new /Q4 option lets you quickly see which files in a large directory are different from the reference files.
• CMP can now compare output of a program to a reference file.
• The demo now works in Windows XP.
• The User Guide was reorganized and major sections were rewritten.

Release 5.1 added the /C option to tell CMP whether to complain about various categories of missing files. It was followed by three minor releases:

• 5.11 told you not only how many difference blocks were found, but how many differing lines.
• 5.12 told you how many files compared the same, compared different, or were missing.
• 5.13 slightly improved debug output and warnings.

Release 5.0 was a complete rewrite from the ground up. It added many new capabilities, including binary files, subdirectory searches, and (in the 16-bit program) better memory use.