Vista - How can you find the lines Compare-Object determines to be differe

Regardless of whether Compare-Object is comparing two text files or the
"chosen" properites of two collections: Files/Processes/... ; there is a
notion of a line or index where the difference was found.

Unfortunately I've not been able to find out how to make Compare-Object do
this.

I thought on a lark I could do pipe the outputs and track the differences
myself however the line counts are ALL messed up

The below will illustrate what I'm seeing

## file Out1; copy OUt1 to Out2 and change one character
clock.avi
imsins.BAK
Blue Lace 16.bmp
Coffee Bean.bmp

## this just dumps out the "line number" and file for debugging purposes
Compare-Object ${cut1} ${cut2} -includeequal | % {$i = 0} { $i++; echo
"`$i is $i and `$_ is $_`n"}


What I've found are the lines that are _equal_ are feed to the pipe first.
Only after this has been drained are the differences piped out. My guess is
Compare-Object is using two arrays (Equal/Diff) and then dumping them to the
pipe.

So now I'm back to square one. Does someone know whether Compare-Object can
dump the "line" numbers out? If not has someone written a Comparsion tool
which will dump out what index/line in the Array/file the differences are
occuring.

Seems like it would have been such a simple feature to add :<

Here is a way with Where-Object and the containment operators. Pipe the line numbers to where-object
so it filters each different line and outputs its number:

1..${cut1}.length | ? {${cut2} -notContains ${cut1}[$_ - 1]}

# ...for the equal lines
1..${cut1}.length | ? {${cut2} -contains ${cut1}[$_ - 1]}

--
Kiron

"Kiron" <Kiron@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:82172493-D903-40C0-853C-D9A41A0912E3@xxxxxxIf you need something that scales up well with large text files, you can try
a script I posted about a week ago that does exactly what you want:

http://janel.spaces.live.com/blog/cn...88C2!345.entry

The blog is in French but you should be able to copy/paste the script
(compare-textfile.ps1) and use it straight away. Let me know however if you
have any question.

The script was not tested thoroughly and is provided "as is" with no
guarantee of any sort.

Jacques