Find difference between trunk and branch?

If you have a checkout of the repository at hand, you can use the ^ (caret, search for it in the manual) notation to reference the root of the repo like this:

svn diff --old ^/branches/0.4.x --new ^/trunk

This works since Subversion 1.6.

If you have an older subversion or no handy checkout of the repo, you can use absolute paths, as described in the original redbook:

svn diff --old http://.../repo/branches/0.4.x --new http://.../repo/trunk/

should give you the answer you're looking for.

Replace http://.../repo/ with the actual URL of your repository.

svn diff ^/trunkUrl/fileName ^/branchUrl/fileName

This will give you the difference between a file in branch and trunk.

You can use the meld tool for comparison instead of using command prompt to see the difference. It goes something like this.

svn diff --diff-cmd='meld' --old http://.../repo/branches/0.4.x --new http://.../repo/trunk/

If you just want to diff against the current branch, you can just use a dot .

svn switch ^/branches/branchName
svn diff . ^/trunk