What is the Windows equivalent of the diff command?

Run this in the CMD shell or batch file:

FC file1 file2

FC can also be used to compare binary files:

FC /B file1 file2

Well, on Windows I happily run diff and many other of the GNU tools. You can do it with cygwin, but I personally prefer GnuWin32 because it is a much lighter installation experience.

So, my answer is that the Windows equivalent of diff, is none other than diff itself!

Winmerge has a command line utility that might be worth checking out.

Also, you can use the graphical part of it too depending on what you need.

Another alternative is to download and install git from here. Then, add the path to Git\bin\ to your PATH variable. This will give you not only diff, but also many other linux commands that you can use from the windows command line.

You can set the PATH variable by right clicking on Computer and selecting Properties. Then you can click on Advanced System Settings on the left side of the screen. In the pop up, click Environment Variables and then either add or update the PATH variable in your user variables with Git\bin\

Git diff documentation

FC works great by in my case it was not helpful as I wanted just the lines that are changed. And FC give additional data like file name, same lines and bilateral comparison.

    >fc data.txt data.txt.bak   
    ***** DATA.TXT
    ####09
    ####09
    ####09
    ***** DATA.TXT.BAK
    ####09
    ####08
    ####09

but in my case I wanted only the lines that have changed and wanted those lines to be exported to different file, without any other header or data.

So I used "findstr" to compare the file :

findstr /V /G:data.txt.bak data.txt >DiffResult.txt

where :

data.txt.bak is the name of old file

data.txt is the name of new file

DiffResult.txt contains the data that is changed i.e just one line ####09