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Selecting Which Changes to Incorporate

You can select all unmerged changes from olderto yoursfor merging into minewith the '-e' or '--ed' option. You can select only the nonover-lapping unmerged changes with '-3' or '--easy-only', and you can select only the overlapping changes with '-x' or '--overlap-only'.

The '-e', '-3' and '-x' options select only unmerged changes, i.e., changes where mine and yours differ; they ignore changes from older to yours where mine and yoursare identical, because they assume that such changes have already been merged. If this assumption is not a safe one, you can use the options, '-A' or '--show-all' (see Marking Conflicts). The following is the output of the command, diff3, with each of these three options (see A Third Sample Input File for the complete contents of the files). Notice that '-e' outputs the union of the disjoint sets of changes output by '-3' and '-x'.

Output of 'diff3 -e lao tzu tao':

11a
-- The Way of Lao-Tzu, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
.
8c
so we may see their result.
.

Output of 'diff3 -3 lao tzu tao':

8c
so we may see their result.
.

Output of 'diff3 -x lao tzu tao':

11a
-- The Way of Lao-Tzu, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
.