The files to compare are mine, older, and yours. At most one of these three file names may be -, which tells diff3 to read the standard input for that file.

-a

Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they do not appear to be text.

-A

Incorporate all changes from older to yours into mine, surrounding all conflicts with bracket lines.

-B

Old behavior of -A. Shows non-conflicts.

-e

Generate an ed script that incorporates all the changes from older to yours into mine.

-E

Like -e, except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first and third files. With -e, an overlapping change looks like this:

<<<<<<< mine
lines from mine
=======
lines from yours
>>>>>>> yours

--ed

Generate an ed script that incorporates all the changes from older to yours into mine.

--easy-only

Like -e, except output only the nonoverlapping changes.

-i

Generate w and q commands at the end of the ed script for System V compatibility. This option must be combined with one of the -AeExX3 options, and may not be combined with -m.

--initial-tab

Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format. This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal.

-L label

--label=label

Use the label label for the brackets output by the -A, -E and -X options. This option may be given up to three times, one for each input file. The default labels are the names of the input files. Thus diff3 -L X -L Y -L Z -m A B C acts like diff3 -m A B C , except that the output looks like it came from files named X, Y and Z rather than from files named A, B and C.

-m

--merge

Apply the edit script to the first file and send the result to standard output. Unlike piping the output from diff3 to ed, this works even for binary files and incomplete lines. -A is assumed if no edit script option is specified.

--overlap-only

Like -e, except output only the overlapping changes.

--show-all

Incorporate all unmerged changes from older to yours into mine, surrounding all overlapping changes with bracket lines.

--show-overlap

Like -e, except bracket lines from overlapping changes' first and third files.

-T

Output a tab rather than two spaces before the text of a line in normal format. This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal.

--text

Treat all files as text and compare them line-by-line, even if they do not appear to be text.

-v

--version

Output the version number of diff3.

-x

Like -e, except output only the overlapping changes.

-X

Like -E, except output only the overlapping changes. In other words, like -x, except bracket changes as in -E.

-3

Like -e, except output only the nonoverlapping changes.