Usage - Difftastic Manual
Description: The official manual for difftastic, the syntactic differ

# Usage

## File Arguments

### Diffing Files

    $ difft sample_files/before.js sample_files/after.js

### Diffing Directories

    $ difft sample_files/dir_before/ sample_files/dir_after/

Difftastic will recursively walk the two directories, diffing files with the same name.

The `--skip-unchanged` option is useful when diffing directories that contain many unchanged files.

### Reading stdin

You can read a file from stdin by specifying `-` as the file path.

    $ cat sample_files/before.js | difft - sample_files/after.js

### Files With Conflicts

(Added in version 0.50.)

If you have a file with `<<<<<<<` conflict markers, you can pass it as a single argument to difftastic. Difftastic will construct the two file states and diff those.

    $ difft sample_files/conflicts.el

## Language Detection

Difftastic guesses the language used based on the file extension, file name, and the contents of the first lines.

You can override the language detection by passing the `--language` option. Difftastic will treat input files as if they had that extension, and ignore other language detection heuristics.

    $ difft --language cpp before.c after.c

## Options

Difftastic includes a range of configuration CLI options, see `difft --help` for the full list.

Difftastic can also be configured with environment variables. These are also visible in `--help`.

For example, `DFT_BACKGROUND=light` is equivalent to `--background=light`. This is useful when using VCS tools like git, where you are not invoking the `difft` binary directly.

## Exit Codes

2: Difftastic was given invalid arguments. This includes invalid usage (e.g. the wrong number of arguments) as well as paths that difftastic cannot read (e.g. non-existent paths or insufficient permissions).

1: When called with `--exit-code`, difftastic will return an exit code of 1 when it finds any syntactic changes (in text files) or byte changes (in binary files).

0: All other cases.