11626 Specifying location of BCSessions.xml and BCPreferences.xml

[chrisjj]

Is there by any chance some undocuemnted was of doing this e.g. a command-line switch?

[Aaron]

No. But BC3 does have an option to point at a Shared BCSessions.xml under the Tools menu -> Options, General section.

[chrisjj]

I guess I could write an .exe wrapper to copy a CL parameter to that variable...

Could you please file the requested feature as a wish? Thanks.

[Zoë]

We don't have a way to doing in on the command line, but you can override the locations in the registry. If HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE has a string at "\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare 3\SettingsPath" it will use that directory instead of %AppData%\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare 3. It will use that for everything (sessions, prefs, state, registration key).

In any case, I think supporting it on the command line is a reasonable feature request, since you gave a good example of where it would be useful.

[chrisjj]

> We don't have a way to doing in on the command line, but you can override the locations in the registry.

Thanks but No Way would that be allowed in the typical prohect control situation.

> In any case, I think supporting it on the command line is a reasonable feature
> request, since you gave a good example of where it would be useful.

Thanks. But I'm somewhat mystified since there are surely users making far more advanced applicatinos that IU would would have needed this already. Or is all project-embedded BCing done by script??

[Zoë]

Thanks. But I'm somewhat mystified since there are surely users making far more advanced applicatinos that IU would would have needed this already. Or is all project-embedded BCing done by script??

No idea. All I can says is that this is the first request for this particular functionality that I'm aware of.

[chrisjj]

Fair enough. Are there other users here who have needed this, and perhaps found an alternative solution?

[EltonP]

To help the next person who has this requirement, in order to find where to store the BCSessions.xml file on our server where we wanted to run bcompare in a headless capacity, I ran a VNC server one time and made a settings change so that it would save down the BCSessions.xml file.

$ find | grep BCSessions
/root/.config/bcompare/BCSessions.xml

Our deployment was a Docker container

FROM debian:buster

This post helped to install VNC into the Docker image https://stackoverflow.com/a/49426599