OpenDiff/SVN command line shortcut

For cross-platform projects, I switched from using XCode to TextMate and CMake. I found this to be a more productive environment for me but I miss the OpenDiff integration that’s built into XCode. Most of the time svn diff is all I need, but for more complex changes the visualization provided by OpenDiff makes life so much easier.

It turns out that Subversion keeps a copy of the unedited version of your source code in its .svn directory. That was all I needed to build a command line shortcut to OpenDiff. The original source is kept in .svn/text-base and has a suffix of .svn-base. My first attempt was to create an alias:

     $ alias od=’opendiff $1 .svn/text-base/$1.svn-base’

But, it turns out that bash aliases do not support parameter substitution. Who knew?

After a little more digging, I discovered you can define functions in bash. So the shortcut then became:

     $ function od { opendiff $1 .svn/text-base/$1.svn-base; }

This did the trick. I can now start OpenDiff with a command like:

     $ od source.cpp

Put the function definition in your .profile (or in .bashrc or in any of the many places you can put startup commands).

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