If "Perform full comparison" is disabled under Options | Dir Comparison, in order to reduce comparison time, ExamDiff Pro identifies differences in matching files by comparing their timestamps, sizes, attributes, CRCs etc, without actually comparing the contents of the files. While this is adequate for most purposes, sometimes you may wish to know for certain whether a pair of files is identical or changed. For this, ExamDiff Pro provides a handy feature to only perform full comparison on certain files.

First let's compare two directories. Because "Perform full comparison" is not used, ExamDiff Pro does not tell us whether pairs of files are identical or changed, but rather marks matching files as Older or Newer.

To perform full comparison on a certain pair of files, select a file or multiple files in one of the comparison panes and either use the Directories | Perform Full Comparison menu command, or right-click on the selected file(s) and choose "Perform Full Comparison" from the context menu. In this case I'm going to compare all of the files.

After all the files are compared, we can clearly see which files are changed and which files are identical. Keep in mind that if you routinely need to perform full comparison on large amounts of files, it may be simpler for you to enable "Perform full comparison" under Options | Dir Comparison, in which full comparison will automatically be performed on all files.