Simulate BC3's Explorer context menu via command line switches

[yaramorgan]

Hi all, I'm a Directory Opus user and am trying to simulate the BC3 Explorer context menu within DOpus. Namely, the following context menu choices:

Select Left Side
Select Right Side
Compare to...

I've looked through BC's command line switches but there doesn't seem to be one that forces the selected file to be shown in the right or left pane. There also doesn't seem to be a way to load a single file into BC, navigate to another directory to select a second file, and then execute a "compare to..." command (referring to the previously loaded file in BC).

Does anyone know of a way to get this done through command line arguments, without having to incorporate BC's shell into DOpus? I figured something simple like the following could work, but it doesn't (most likely because I haven't fully understood BC's command line switches)

C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BCompare.exe" /left {filepath$}

I've already asked at the DOpus forums but nobody seems to have any idea how to accomplish this. Again, this is not dependent on the use of Directory Opus - anyone using something other than Explorer may want to simulate the BC context menu in their preferred file manager via BC's command line switches. If anyone has any ideas, please give a shout

[Zoë]

If you install BC's Explorer integration Directory Opus (at least v9.5) will show those commands in the right click menu for a file and in it's File top level menu. Are you saying you want it to work without installing the context menu enhancement? If that's the case we really can't help. Those commands are all handled by the shell extension itself; the only time BC is involved is when you finally select "Compare" and the extension launches BC with the two files you've selected. BC doesn't support a /left switch or anything like it.

[yaramorgan]

Hi Craig, thanks for your reply. I figured it wasn't possible to simulate the shell via command line, but I thought I'd ask just in case I missed something in the documentation. I have BC3 installed and have been using it's context menu from within Directory Opus by directly integrating the BC3 shell. However, as of late, I've wanted to get rid of the explorer shell within DOpus because I felt it was making the program (DOpus) lag a bit. But BC3 is such an essential program for me that I will have to make an exception