How to view a diff of a file in a changeset against its previous changeset in TFS tf.exe commandline?

Question

In git there is the ^ caret notation to indicate the notion of what is before it.

In tf.exe commandline, I have to put 2 changeset numbers in order to the a diff. I am only interested in the diff against the previous changeset so I like the below to work, but it is not working:

tf diff path/to/file.cpp /version:^69~69

Rationale is that, I don't want the hassle of cut and pasting and searching what the previous changeset number is.

Answer 1

Since it looked like that TFS tf.exe does not support it, therefore I provide below an alternative solution which works in cygwin shell. You have to first create a symlink tf to where the location of your tf.exe is. And in .bashrc add the following function:

tf_diff () {
    [ $# -ne 2 ] && return
    local TLINES=$(tput lines)
    local ARTIFACT=$1
    local CHANGESET=$2

    local $PREVIOUS=$(tf history . /recursive | sed -n "/$CHANGESET/{n;p;}" | cut -d' ' -f1)

    local TMPFILE=$(mktemp --suffix=.diff)
    rm -f $TMPFILE

    tf diff $ARTIFACT /version:$PREVIOUS~$CHANGESET > $TMPFILE;
    if [ $(wc -l < $TMPFILE) -gt $TLINES ]; then
        vim $TMPFILE
    else
        cat $TMPFILE
    fi
    rm -f $TMPFILE
}

You may choose to save previous histories into a file, so that only then you will remote query TFS history if a changeset is not in file.

I will accept this answer once I am certain that indeed TFS tf.exe cannot do it.