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I have a application, I wrote 6 years ago, which includes functionality to compare files. Recently this seems to ignore the compare files command. I did a little digging into the code, and this uses opendiff to perform this function.

I will try to dive into the code to follow up, but my question relates to some of my findings.

There are 2 instances of opendiff

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/opendiff
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23712  5 Jun 13:22 /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/opendiff

/usr/bin/opendiff
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18304 30 May 09:35 /usr/bin/opendiff

Running the first works as expected.

Running the second produces the following error

xcode-select: error: tool 'opendiff' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

This error is incomprehensible (at least to me), and I do not know where this came from.

I suspected Command Line Tools may be implicated, and I did install brew 2 days ago (to get an up-to-date rsync)

I would just delete /usr/bin/opendiff, but cannot - probably due to SIP.

I just booted up my MacBook Pro running 10.13.3 and all seems OK.

/usr/bin/opendiff runs, and starts FileMerge 2.10

Milliways
  • 7,972

1 Answers1

11

Switch your active developer directory to the correct one as opposed to the one that was chosen (the one in the error message) when brew installed command line tools with:

xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
David Smith
  • 458