Compare two folders(recursively) for file names and file contents

alaios · 04-27-2012, 02:36 AM

Dear all,
I have received a hard disk from our technical department that has my data copied to a larger hard disk. I still also have the original disk with me and I was thinking if there´is any way to compare files and folders differences (not only file names as diff returns but also in their contents, so to make sure that the copy worked ok).

I

What do you suggest?

A

pan64 · 04-27-2012, 03:24 AM

generate a list on the two drives, like ls -lR and compare the two results.

descendant_command · 04-27-2012, 04:21 AM

Maybe use rsync -n (dry run) to generate a list of different files, then feed the pairs to diff to compare contents.

Maybe diff has an option for this type of compare but I'm no guru with it.

alaios · 04-27-2012, 07:38 AM

Actually I have tried this one...

rsync -rvnc website/ laptop

rojects/website/

sag47 · 04-29-2012, 12:05 PM

Dry run with the update switch (-u) meaning it will only overwrite changed files.

Code:

rsync -ruptvn src/ dst/ > /tmp/output

Then you can edit the output file and delete the "speedup" output from the top and bottom so you just have the files to work with. Then you can run a diff...

Assuming you're using bash with the following,

Code:

sourcedir=src;destdir=dst;cat /tmp/output | while read file;do diff -rupN $sourcedir/$file $destdir/$file;done >> /tmp/differences;unset sourcedir destdir

Look at the /tmp/differences file to see the changes from diff.

SAM

acalderon · 05-04-2012, 01:40 AM

A similar answer. I found this:

http://superuser.com/questions/16631...omparing-files

Basicaly, you run diff with two flags "qr" as follows:

diff -qr dir1 dir2

Make shure you substitute dir1 and dir2 with the directory paths that you want to compare. It will let you know if there are any diferences in directory structure and file contents.

Regards.

tux111 · 10-27-2017, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acalderon

A similar answer. I found this:

http://superuser.com/questions/16631...omparing-files

Basicaly, you run diff with two flags "qr" as follows:

diff -qr dir1 dir2

Make shure you substitute dir1 and dir2 with the directory paths that you want to compare. It will let you know if there are any diferences in directory structure and file contents.

Regards.

Does diff also consider contents of the files - not only file names?

nodir · 10-27-2017, 09:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tux111

Does diff also consider contents of the files - not only file names?

Code:

user$ mkdir foo bar
user$ vi foo/testfile.txt
user$ cat foo/testfile.txt > ba
bar/     bar.txt  baz.txt  
user$ cat foo/testfile.txt > bar/testfile.txt
user$ diff foo/testfile.txt bar/testfile.txt 
user$ echo "difference" >> bar/testfile.txt 
user$ diff foo/testfile.txt bar/testfile.txt 
1a2
> difference
user$

pan64 · 10-28-2017, 03:45 AM

another approach can be to use dupfinder....

fatmac · 10-28-2017, 04:20 AM

You might also like to take a look at 'man cmp'.