CLion 2016.2 Help

Running CLion as a Diff or Merge Command Line Tool

In this topic:

Overview

Besides using CLion as an Integrated Development Environment, you can use it as a command line tool for comparing and merging files.

CLion executable is platform-dependent:

  • Windows: clionXX\bin\.exe or clionXX\bin\.bat
  • UNIX: clionXX/bin/.sh
  • OS X: /Applications/clionXX.app/Contents/MacOS/

    To add the launcher to your path, add its containing directory /Applications/CLion.app/Contents/MacOS.

However, for OS X and UNIX, one should create a wrapper script, since this helps avoid some drawbacks related to the usage of CLion launcher.

Enabling invocation of CLion operations from the command line

For OS X and UNIX platforms, we recommend creating the wrapper script, or the command line launcher to integrate CLion with your shell. Then, you need to ensure that the created launcher script is within the search path of your shell.

On Windows, we recommend to add the path to CLion to the environment variable Path. Everything is done outside of CLion, with the CLion executable.

Note that if you have specified location of the CLion executable as a Path environment variable, the command will work no matter which directory you are currently in.

To enable invoking CLion operations from the command line, follow these steps

  • On OS X or UNIX:
    1. Make sure CLion is running.
    2. On the main menu, choose Tools | Create Command-line Launcher. The dialog box Create Launcher Script opens, with the suggested path and name of the launcher script. You can accept default, or specify your own path.

      Make notice of it, as you'll need it later.

    3. Outside of CLion, add the path and name of the launcher script to your path.
  • On Windows:
    • Specify the location of the CLion executable in the Path system environment variable. In this case, you will be able to invoke the CLion executable and other CLion commands from any directory.

Comparing files using CLion as a command line tool

To compare two files using CLion as a diff command line tool

  1. Enable invoking CLion operations from the command line.
  2. Type the following command at the command line prompt:
    <CLion launcher(Windows) or wrapper script (MacOS or UNIX)> diff <path to file1> <path to file2>
    where file1 is your local copy, file2 is the repository version.

For example:

diff README.md.bak README.md

Merging files using CLion as a command line tool

Most often you need to merge three versions of the same file: your local version, the version in the repository or in the upstream, and the base revision, which is the origin for the two diverged versions.

To merge files using CLion as a command line tool

  1. Enable invoking CLion operations from the command line.
  2. Type the following command at the command line prompt:
    <CLion launcher(Windows) or wrapper script (MacOS or UNIX)> merge <path to file1> <path to file2> <path to file3> <path to output>
    where file1 is your local copy, file2 is the repository version, file3 is the base revision for file1 and file2, and output is the file to save the merge results in (optional).

Passing three arguments to merge tool

It is possible to pass just three arguments to the merge tool:

<path to file1> <path to file2> <path to output>.

In this case, the contents of the output will be taken as the base revision:

<CLion launcher> merge <path to file1> <path to file2> <path to output> <path to output>

See the example in this blog to learn how to use CLion diff and merge tool with Git.

See Also

Last modified: 22 November 2016