can anyone throw together a quick script/command that simply outputs the differences between the contents (hidden files included) of 2 folders (recursively so that i can say compare quickly /home to /copyof/home without doing all the individual sub-folders) ?

a 'no difference found' ouput option would also be nice

i sort of think what i need to ls -aR one folder, ls -aR the other, then diff the 2 outputs, with a 'no diference' condition if there is none - but i'm a bit new to all this and can't hang it all together !

any help much appreciated

thanks

You want:

diff -r directory1 directory2

If you want "no difference found", then write a script. In that script, send the output to a scratch file. Then test whether the file contains any bytes (use the -s conditional expression in bash), and if it doesn't, then echo no difference found. For further details on the -s conditional expression, see the man page:

man bash

Don't confuse it with the -s switch! In the man page, search for

^CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS

and then search for -s.

For help with conditional expressions and general help on writing bash scripts, see

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Hope this helps.

thanks very much for that

i had it in my head that diff only worked on files not folders

i'll give that a go and maybe even tinker with a small script

Just to point out - directories ARE files. In Linux, everything is a file. You just have to deal with permissions.

Yes, wahming, but babysnake would not be interested in directories at that level. In the case of directories, he would be interested in comparing all the files in those directories. And so on.