8.5 Saving the Changed File

Traditional Unix diff3 generates an ed script without the trailing ‘w’ and ‘q’ commands that save the changes. System V diff3 generates these extra commands. GNU diff3 normally behaves like traditional Unix diff3, but with the ‘-i’ option it behaves like System V diff3 and appends the ‘w’ and ‘q’ commands.

The ‘-i’ option requires one of the ed script options ‘-AeExX3’, and is incompatible with the merged output option ‘-m’.