can you use diff across the network?
 

hi. i am backing up a few files on my laptop to my desktop in order to try a new distro on the laptop. I want to double check and make sure all files got there correctly (I used scp) Is diff capable of comparing two files on two different machines? i thought maybe ndiff would logically be the network version but it compares nmap outputs. Also i don't know if diff is the program i would use because it is two directories i want to compare. If diff can't compare files over a network i think that would be a useful feature to add, but im sure someone has thought of that and if it is not a feature of diff probably a feature of another program. If it is another program with that feature does anyone know what it is called? thanks for any replies in advance.

diff won't work over a network per se, but if you mount a share from the network machine using NFS, Samba or sshfs then you can easily diff the directories.

thanks. What i ended up doing was changing to the directory that i put all the files in and did ls > backupcontents on both machines, copied the file from the remote machine to the local machine using scp and then used diff on both of the files. Probably not the best way but it worked. It is only some mp3's i was backing up and nothing too important. So that is another benefit of using fuse+sshfs is the network transparency. i started looking into that but hadn't gotten around to recompiling a kernel with fuse in it. that is on my todo list because it will be nice if i can mount my harddrive with all my mp3's on it from my laptop so i could rip all my cds to one hardrive and have both the laptop and desktop share them. thanks for your reply.

huh? If you mount a samba share of any type of share for that matter it is basically transparent and you can use it as if it was on the local machine. All my oggs are on one machine and I play them wherever I am, in fact for that I dont even setup a mount I just browse the network using gnomes places->network and then just locate my oggs, drag them over into my musicplayer and I am good to go...