Treediff command line survival guide

I wanted to do it a long time ago, but time has passed and I was forgetting about it over and over again. So finally here are some advices about using the tfpt treediff command line.

• First of all treediff has noprompt switch, which is not included in the command description. The output is divided into 4 sections – items with the same content, different content, existing only in source and existing only in target location.
• The registry settings affects the command line (even /noprompt) so keep this in mind writing scripts – to be completely sure that you are getting the correct content you need to verify content of the keys Brian described here
• Comparing local to server folder might be tricky if local folder is not mapped (it doesn’t have to be mapped to selected server path)
• If you want to compare local mapped folder to its server state, it’s enough to specify the local path, the server path will be calculated by folderdiff
• When comparing two server paths, remember about /s:[server name] option
• While comparing big trees keep in mind that we don’t handle errors very well in powertoy – it doesn’t matter if you don’t have permissions for server folder or file (because you just don’t see it then) but local file block for reading or without permissions will make folderdiff to fail

Most, if not all, of the mentioned issues will be corrected in the FolderDiff Orcas feature, described by Brian here.