Can I compare only file contents?

Question

I want to compare two folders, each having about 5-6 thousands files and folders. Among these probably 0.1% would be actually different but WinMerge first shows all files saying "text files are different" and when I open these files one by one it opens a dialog saying contents in both files are the same. It is nearly impossible for me to find files actually having different text, in this way.
First, I tried to set options but no success.
Then, I thought this initial difference may be due to different time stamps. So I made all file time stamps (create, last modified and last accessed ) exactly the same but the result is the still same.
Am I missing something? Or is there any way to filter the list so that I may see only the files with some difference? Or any other idea?

Answer 1

I would have thought that WinMerge with the following settings would work:

If it doesn't, I would ask the question in their forums.
I believe this is worth the effort, as WinMerge is my best file-compare product.

Answer 2

Try setting the Compare option "Ignore carriage return differences".

Differences in line endings (CRLF/CR/LF) are the usual suspect when one mode of comparison (binary) reports differences but another mode (text) claims that the files are the same.

Answer 3

I had the same problem with WinMerge 2.14. So I tried WinMerge 2.16.2, problem solved.

Answer 4

Try with the software called 'Beyond Compare'.

Answer 5

You might want to try ECMerge or Araxis as well. They both have appropriate settings to ignore spaces / CRLF.