A directory comparison and manipulation tool

Nowadays file browsers represent a common means to organize hierarchically structured data provided by a file system. However, when it comes to comparing and merging different directory structures, file browsers often do not explicitly support users to accomplish such a task. In this paper, we present a special-purpose approach focusing on the manipulation of directory structures in the context of comparison. To this end, two directory structures including subdirectories and files are displayed side by side while links between them indicate similar files. Drag-and-drop operations allow the users for interactively manipulating or merging both directory structures.