Cyotek Registry Comparer

A simple tool to capture snapshots of the state of one more registry keys, then compare them for differences. Includes both an easy to use GUI and CLI clients.

As with many of my tools, this was put together in a hurry, used for its intended purpose then essentially forgotten about. Bugs are likely to be present and performance could be improved. Caveat emptor!

Clients

• regcmp.exe - This is a console based command line client, useful for automated testing and scripting scenarios
• regcmpui.exe - This is a GUI that allows easy collection, viewing and comparing of snapshots

Command Line Client

Arguments

The command line client supports the following arguments

Argument	Description
/nologo	Do not display the startup banner and copyright message.
/key	The full name of a key to snapshot. Can be specified multiple times.
/name	The name of the snapshot, and used as the output file name.
/addtimestamp	Adds the current date and time to the snapshot name.

Arguments without names are treat as input files for comparisons.

All input and output paths are relative to the startup directory.

Exit Codes

Code	Description
0	Success
1	Invalid parameters
2	A compare operation found differences
255	The program failed with an error

Examples

A selection of sample snapshots can be found in the snapshots folder of this repository

Taking a snapshot

This example creates a snapshot named software and containing the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE keys. The name will also have the current date and time appended to it.

regcmp.exe /key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE" /key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE" /name software /addtimestamp

Comparing a snapshot

This example will compare the snapshot test_delsubkey.rge against test_base.rge

regcmp.exe test_delsubkey.rge test_base.rge

Screenshots

Comparing a pair of snapshots using the CLI tool

Comparing the same snapshots using the GUI tool

Capturing a new snapshot using the CLI tool

Viewing a snapshot using the GUI tool