Hi

is there a way to compare byte to byte files or folders on a local machine to a files or folders on a remote machine (some kind of remote cmp))?

thanks.

all you need is mounting the remote files/folders and execute your comparison task as usual (as it's a local one). You can use NFS to mount remote files/folders.

You can run an algorithm against the two, if the sum is the same, the files are the same, by running the sha1sum for example:
If there is a difference in the output of the sha1sum command on both, you can then use diff to compare the files line by line.

Is the directory structure of the files the same on both machines?
If so and you have ssh access, you could run something like:
find /path/to/directory -type f -exec md5sum '{}' \; >local.md5
on the local machine.

Then copy the local.md5 file to the same base directory on the remote machine and log in with ssh.
md5sum --check local.md5 >results

This uses the checksum results from the local machine to check the files on the remote machine, running md5sum on the remote machine.

You can then filter out positive results:
sed '/: OK/d' results | less

This will probably be faster than running cmp over the network. Especially if you have hundreds or thousands of files to check.