compare-cli

Clause-aware drift detection between two contract versions. Pre-signature gate for legal teams and agent pipelines. Single-file Node CLI, two runtime deps, deterministic by design, no LLM tier in v1.

Part of the contract-ops CLI suite: template-vault-cli (storage) → draft-cli (fill placeholders) → nda-review-cli (review, redline, negotiate) → docx2pdf-cli (DOCX → PDF) → sign-cli (signing + audit). compare-cli is the pre-signature drift gate. Showcase site.

compare negotiated.docx ready-to-sign.pdf
# exit 0 = safe to sign
# exit 2 = substantive drift, DO NOT sign without review
# exit 3 = cosmetic / typographic drift only (informational)
# exit 4 = clauses moved, content identical

Part of the contract-ops CLI suite. draft-cli (fill placeholders) → nda-review-cli (review, redline, negotiate) → docx2pdf-cli (DOCX → PDF) → sign-cli (signing + audit). Storage: template-vault-cli. Drift detection: compare-cli (this CLI). Showcase site.

Agent pipelines: see mcp/README.md for compare-cli-mcp, the MCP server wrapping this CLI. Three tools (compare_files, compare_with_negotiation, compare_demo), stdio transport, JSON-first responses. Design contract: docs/mcp.md.

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Why

You negotiated a contract over several rounds with counterparty's counsel. A few days later their paralegal sends you a ready-to-sign.pdf. Is the PDF the same text you agreed to, or did something quietly shift between "final version" and "version we put in the signing envelope"?

compare-cli answers that question with an exit code your CI can gate on:

• Exit 0: every clause matches. Safe to sign.
• Exit 2: substantive drift — a clause's text changed, a clause was added, or a clause was removed. The exact change is in the report. Do not sign without review.
• Exit 3: cosmetic-only (whitespace, curly quotes, em-dashes) or typographic-only (case, $1,000 vs $1000, Oxford comma) drift. Informational; the agreement didn't change.
• Exit 4: clauses moved but content is identical. Order shifted; the agreement didn't change.

The CLI works on .docx, .pdf, .md, and plain text — including cross-format comparisons (negotiated .docx vs ready-to-sign .pdf).

Install

npm install -g compare-cli

Or run without installing:

npx -p compare-cli@latest -- compare --demo

(The package is compare-cli; the installed command is compare. The -p … -- compare form tells npx which package to fetch and which bin to run, since the two names differ.)

Requires Node ≥ 20. (Pinned by pdfjs-dist@^5.7.284, which we share with sign-cli.)

Run this

compare --demo

Runs against two bundled fixtures (a negotiated NDA and a candidate where the term silently shifted from "two (2) years" to "three (3) years") and exits 2. You see the headline contract — substantive drift detected, report written, exit code asserted — without authoring a file.

compare --demo --json

Same comparison, structured JSON output to stdout.

Where to go next

If you are…	Start here
A new user evaluating the gate	Run this above, then the End-to-end transcript
An LLM agent driving the CLI	AGENTS.md → compare --catalog json → compare <base> <candidate> --json
Gating in CI	compare --check (exit-code only) or --sarif for code-scanning
Wiring via MCP	the compare-cli-mcp package — see docs/mcp.md
Adding a new CLI to the suite	The build-a-CLI playbook — the conventions every suite CLI follows

End-to-end transcript

# You negotiated this:
cat > negotiated.md <<'EOF'
## 1. Purpose
This agreement governs information exchange between Acme and Globex.

## 2. Term
The term is two (2) years from the Effective Date.

## 3. Notices
All notices shall be delivered to the addresses on the cover page.
EOF

# They sent back this:
cat > ready-to-sign.md <<'EOF'
## 1. Purpose
This agreement governs information exchange between Acme and Globex.

## 2. Term
The term is three (3) years from the Effective Date.

## 3. Notices
All notices shall be delivered to the addresses on the cover page.
EOF

# Gate on it:
compare negotiated.md ready-to-sign.md
# → substantive drift, exit 2
echo "exit: $?"

# Or feed the base from nda-review-cli's negotiation.json:
compare --from-negotiation negotiation.json ready-to-sign.pdf

# Strict mode: treat typographic drift ($1,000 vs $1000) as substantive too
compare negotiated.md ready-to-sign.md --strict

In a CI pipeline:

compare negotiated.docx received/$(date +%F).pdf || {
  status=$?
  case $status in
    0) echo "✓ safe to sign" ;;
    2) echo "✗ substantive drift — do not sign" ;;
    3) echo "⚠ cosmetic drift only — informational" ;;
    4) echo "⚠ clauses moved but content identical" ;;
    *) echo "✗ I/O or arg error" ;;
  esac
  exit $status
}

Command reference

USAGE
  compare BASE CANDIDATE [options]
  compare --from-negotiation NEG.json CANDIDATE [options]
  compare --demo [--json]

ARGS
  BASE        what was agreed (.docx | .pdf | .md | .txt | - for stdin)
  CANDIDATE   what is being put forward (same formats, or -)

OPTIONS
  --from-negotiation PATH   read base text from nda-review-cli's negotiation.json
  --require-signoffs        with --from-negotiation, require both parties to have signed off
  --only-clauses PATTERNS   comma-separated; only include matching clause titles in the report + exit code
  --ignore-clauses PATTERNS comma-separated; exclude matching clause titles from the report + exit code
  --strict                  treat typographic drift as substantive (exit 2)
  --strict-cosmetic         treat cosmetic drift as substantive (exit 2)
  --json                    emit structured JSON to stdout
  --sarif                   emit SARIF v2.1.0 to stdout (for code-scanning / CI annotations)
  --no-intra-diff           disable inline word-level diff inside substantive clauses
  --why                     print structured explanation to stderr
  --silent, -q              suppress stderr
  --check                   suppress all output; communicate via exit code only (implies --silent)
  --output, -o PATH         write report to PATH instead of stdout (ignored with --check)
  --completion bash|zsh     emit shell completion script
  --demo                    run a zero-file 30-second demo
  --version, -V             print version
  --help, -h                show this help

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	No drift detected, safe to sign
1	I/O error — input not found, unreadable, malformed .docx/.pdf
2	Substantive drift (or --strict/--strict-cosmetic was set and tripped)
3	Cosmetic-only or typographic-only drift (informational)
4	Clause(s) moved but content identical

Stable across minor versions. Documented in AGENTS.md and COMPARE_SCHEMA.md.

What counts as which class?

• cosmetic — whitespace runs, line wraps, curly vs straight quotes, em-dashes vs hyphens, NBSP vs space, ellipsis vs ...
• typographic — number formatting ($1,000 vs $1000, 5.0% vs 5%), Oxford comma flips, case-only differences (Acme vs ACME)
• substantive — any word change, addition, deletion, or clause reorganization (will not vs will, two years vs three years, clauses added or removed)
• moved — clauses whose text is byte-identical but whose position in the ordered clause sequence changed

The exact rules — including what is deliberately not normalized away (singular/plural, tense, negation, list punctuation) — are locked in COMPARE_SCHEMA.md §5–§6.

--json output shape

Stable across minor versions. Top-level keys: ok, exit_class, exit_code, base, candidate, summary, differences, warnings. See COMPARE_SCHEMA.md §10 for the full shape.

--why output

Structured key=value lines on stderr describing detection tiers, alignment method, class counts, exit decision, and strict-mode state. Same posture as draft-cli's --why.

--from-negotiation

Reads nda-review-cli's negotiation.json and extracts the latest agreed text as BASE. Three-tier resolution (preferred → fallback): top-level status: converged|signed_off|finalized, per-round agreed: true (minimum schema), per-round clause_status all "agreed" (historical fallback). See COMPARE_SCHEMA.md §9.

Pair with --require-signoffs when running unattended: it errors (exit 2) unless both signoffs.a and signoffs.b are non-empty in the state file. nda-review-cli populates these when the negotiate sign-off checkpoint is satisfied — a human-review gate before any agreement is acted on.

Clause filters

--only-clauses Term,Payment,Indemnification keeps only matching clauses in the report and exit-code calculation; --ignore-clauses Acknowledgments,Notices drops matching ones. Patterns are case-insensitive substrings, matched against numbering-stripped clause titles. Both flags can combine (--ignore-clauses runs after --only-clauses). The number of suppressed differences is surfaced in the human report and as summary.suppressed_by_filter in --json / SARIF output, so the suppression is auditable.

--sarif (CI / code-scanning)

--sarif emits a SARIF v2.1.0 document. Each substantive difference is a result with level: error; cosmetic/typographic are warning; added/removed/moved are note. Designed for GitHub Actions code- scanning upload — substantive drift appears as inline annotations on the candidate file in the PR review UI.

compare base.docx contracts/2026/acme.docx --sarif > compare.sarif
# upload via: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3 with sarif_file=compare.sarif

--check (exit-code-only mode)

--check suppresses both stdout and stderr; the exit code is the only output. Use for CI gates and short shell pipelines:

compare base.docx cand.docx --check && echo "safe to sign"

Implies --silent. --output is also skipped under --check (you said you only care about the exit code).

If no agreed round exists, the CLI exits 2 with a clear error.

Working with PDFs

Text extraction from .pdf is layout-lossy. When either side is a PDF, the report surfaces a warning:

warning: candidate was extracted from PDF; layout-sensitive differences
         may surface as false positives

If extraction returns zero characters (a scanned PDF without an OCR layer), compare-cli exits 1 with a clear message rather than silently reporting no drift.

Part of the contract-ops suite

cli.drbaher.com

Pipeline (in order):

• draft-cli — fills placeholders in templates before negotiation begins.
• nda-review-cli — owns the negotiation.json hash-chained state file. --from-negotiation reads its output.
• docx2pdf-cli — the upstream step that turns the agreed .docx into the .pdf you put in the signing envelope.
• sign-cli — runs the actual signing flow; compare-cli is the gate that runs before it.

Auxiliaries:

• template-vault-cli — clause-aware template storage; produces info --json payloads that downstream tools consume. Implements the same clause-detection rule (docs/clause-detection.md) compare-cli does; divergences tracked in template-vault-cli/docs/clause-detection-divergence.md.

Documentation

• COMPARE_SCHEMA.md — v1 contract. The single source of truth for what the CLI does. Implementation and tests are written against this file.
• AGENTS.md — for LLM consumers and agent pipelines. Stable output shapes, exit codes, failure diagnosis.
• ARCHITECTURE.md — how the CLI is shaped and why.
• GETTING_STARTED.md — 10-minute walkthrough.
• FAQ.md — common questions.
• SECURITY.md — disclosure policy.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — for contributors.
• CHANGELOG.md — release history.

License

MIT © DrBaher