folder compare with ZIP files not named .zip

[florian]

How can I change a hex compare session to a folder compare session (ZIP files) if the files have been opened as a hex compare?

I'd like to compare two revisions of a ZIP file from our revision control system (MKS).
Sadly, MKS does not preserve the original file extension and saves the two revisions to be compared as temporary files with the extension ".tmp".

Beyond Compare treats these files as hex files which is reasonable. But how can I change the comparison type to folder compare and have them treated as ZIP files?

-florian

[Aaron]

Hello,

You can use the Hex Compare's Session menu -> Compare Parent Folders to load a Folder Compare with those two items as items within the comparison.

You can also add *.tmp as a .zip archive type in the Tools menu -> Options, Folder Views section, in the Archive associations section. Scroll to Zip, and add *.tmp to the ; delimited list.
Or you can run a binary scan on *.tmp without the archive association from the Folder Compare.

How do these solutions work for you?

[florian]

Hello Aaron,

thanks for the answer. Unfortunateley, both solutions could not solve the problem.

Comparing the parent directories shows the temp folder with dozens of files in it with indistinguishable names (like SID7593295609825517344.tmp). But even if I find the two files, I cannot compare them as ZIP files.

The second solution basically works but then I'm not able to compare any other (i.e. non-ZIP) files from MKS Source Integrity anymore, because they are also checked out as .tmp files and BC complains that the folder was not found if e.g. a C++ text file is to be compared.

I'll revert to manually renaming the files and I don't blame BC for this. I filed a support request years ago with MKS but they did not yet fix their dumb temp file naming scheme...

Thanks,

Florian

[deruss]

I want to compare self-extracting .EXEs (SFX) files on a network share. Extracting the files to a temporary location is slow and uses too much resources. Thanks to your suggestion I found I could add .exe to the .RAR archive association and it works!

Thanks

[xmattz]

Hi,

This problem was bugging me too, I found your post and was disapointed there were no solution.
So finally I did some investigation and build my own solution. The idea is to wrap bc2 exec. The wrapper just check if the content of the file is zip or not, if it is, it rename the tmp to zip and then run beyond compare.
I did that in java, maybe it could be done faster with some other language but anyway. So you need to compile the attached src, package in a zip and then wrap it in a exe (with launch4j for instance). Or you can directly the exe . Then in MKS you can just use a command such as :
C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 2\bcmks.exe "{3}" "{4}" "bc2"

Regards,
Matthieu