Comparing property files on linux

I was upgrading sonarqube and one of the things was to move custom settings in the old property file to the new one. They say don’t copy the whole file as other things may have changed etc…

Property files tend to be huge things with alot of the defaults commented out so find the bits you added can be a bit of fun.

You can of course use good ole grep to only show the uncommented lines

grep -v '^#' sonar.properties

-v inverts the match '^#' is lines start with a comment

But I wanted to compare the files and ignore the irrelevant bits.

diff is a bit hard on the eyes I think so used sdiff ‘side by side diff’

What I ended up with was

sdiff --strip-trailing-cr -sBI '^#' /opt/sonarqube-5.1.2/conf/sonar.properties /opt/sonar/conf/sonar.properties

So I ended up throwing a few options at it