How Can I Diff Massive Files Using External Tools?

I want to diff a war file but IDEA takes too long.
An alternative would be to do something with external tools.
e.g. list the contents to a temporary file, sort the file, get the previous version from version control, list the contents of that and sort it then launch IDEA diff.

I can do the listing and sorting etc from the command line.
How do I wrap this as an external tool and then launch IDEA diff on the two files?

Ideally after it is finished I would delete the two files too.
Is that possible or should I just redirect to thte temp dir and let the OS delete them?

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Raviteja Lokineni

Why would you want to diff a war file?

As far as I know there is no external tool which does that.

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I'm refactoring a very complicated fragile build and I want to make sure that the output doesn't change due to my refactorings.

My question is really, how do I run a script as an External Tool that can also launch IDEA diff at the end of it?

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Raviteja Lokineni

In a ideal scenario there should be a automation testing environment which would run all the tests against your build. This is how it's done generally.

But if you diff a war file there would be some xml, html, js which can be diffed. Most of the time you would end up seeing a bunch of bytecode class files which are cannot be diffed. You might want to reconsider doing that.

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Lets ignore the fact that I mentioned war files.
I just want to know how I can run a script as an External Tool and also launch IDEA diff at the end of it.

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