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Thanks for reporting this. It is not actually about files being read-only. WinMerge simply tries to return compare status.

This "feature" was added in back for selftests or some such and unfortunately nobody really thought about it.

I'll fix this for next stable release to return 0 unless there is an error.

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I'll fix this bug with this simple patch which makes WinMerge always to return 0.

So the approach I'll take is start with always returning zero. And add possible error returns when we really need those. At the moment I don't know situation where we must return something other than 0. Some merge scripts etc probably would want return value if the merge succeeded, but that is not easy as user can open another files or folders and close original files so we don't even know which file's return value we should return (ones given from command-line? last opened?...)

Index: Merge.cpp

--- Merge.cpp (revision 4956)
+++ Merge.cpp (working copy)
@@ -447,7 +447,7 @@
charsets_cleanup();
delete m_mainThreadScripts;
CWinApp::ExitInstance();
- return m_nLastCompareResult;
+ return 0;
}

static void AddEnglishResourceHook()

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Committed to SVN trunk:
Completed: At revision: 4970

Closing as fixed.