diff to output only the file names

Question

I m looking to run a Linux command that will recursively compare two directories and output only the file names of what is different  This includes anything that is present in one directory and not the other or vice versa  and text differences

User · Answer

On my linux system to get just the filenames  diff -q  dir1  dir2 cut -f2 -d

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If you want to get a list of files that are only in one directory and not their sub directories and only their file names   diff -q  dir1  dir2   grep  dir1   grep -E   Only in     sed -n  s          p    If you want to recursively list all the files and directories that are different with their full paths   diff -rq  dir1  dir2   grep -E   Only in  dir1     sed -n  s    p    awk   print  3    4     This way you can apply different commands to all the files    For example I could remove all the files and directories that are in dir1 but not dir2   diff -rq  dir1  dir2   grep -E   Only in  dir1     sed -n  s    p    awk   print  3    4   xargs -I    rm -r

User · Answer

You can also use rsync  rsync -rv --size-only --dry-run  my source   my dest   gt  diff out

User · Answer

rsync -rvc --delete --size-only --dry-run source dir target dir

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From the diff man page      -q  nbsp  Report only whether the files differ  not the details of the differences    -r  nbsp  When comparing directories  recursively compare any subdirectories found    Example command   diff -qr dir1 dir2   Example output  depends on locale      ls dir1 dir2 dir1  same-file  different  only-1  dir2  same-file  different  only-2   diff -qr dir1 dir2 Files dir1 different and dir2 different differ Only in dir1  only-1 Only in dir2  only-2

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The approach of running diff -qr old  new  has one major drawback  it may miss files in newly created directories  E g  in the example below the file data pages playground playground txt is not in the output of  diff -qr old  new  whereas the directory data pages playground  is  search for playground txt in your browser to quickly compare   I also posted the following solution on Unix  amp  Linux Stack Exchange  but I ll copy it here as well   To create a list of new or modified files programmatically the best solution I could come up with is using rsync  sort  and uniq    rsync -rcn --out-format   n  old  new   amp  amp  rsync -rcn --out-format   n  new  old     sort   uniq   Let me explain with this example  we want to compare two dokuwiki releases to see which files were changed and which ones were newly created   We fetch the tars with wget and extract them into the directories old  and new    wget http   download dokuwiki org src dokuwiki dokuwiki-2014-09-29d tgz wget http   download dokuwiki org src dokuwiki dokuwiki-2014-09-29 tgz mkdir old  amp  amp  tar xzf dokuwiki-2014-09-29 tgz -C old --strip-components 1 mkdir new  amp  amp  tar xzf dokuwiki-2014-09-29d tgz -C new --strip-components 1   Running rsync one way might miss newly created files as the comparison of rsync and diff shows here   rsync -rcn --out-format   n  old  new    yields the following output   VERSION doku php conf mime conf inc auth php inc lang no lang php lib plugins acl remote php lib plugins authplain auth php lib plugins usermanager admin php   Running rsync only in one direction misses the newly created files and the other way round would miss deleted files  compare the output of diff   diff -qr old  new    yields the following output   Files old VERSION and new VERSION differ Files old conf mime conf and new conf mime conf differ Only in new data pages  playground Files old doku php and new doku php differ Files old inc auth php and new inc auth php differ Files old inc lang no lang php and new inc lang no lang php differ Files old lib plugins acl remote php and new lib plugins acl remote php differ Files old lib plugins authplain auth php and new lib plugins authplain auth php differ Files old lib plugins usermanager admin php and new lib plugins usermanager admin php differ   Running rsync both ways and sorting the output to remove duplicates reveals that the directory data pages playground  and the file data pages playground playground txt were missed initially    rsync -rcn --out-format   n  old  new   amp  amp  rsync -rcn --out-format   n  new  old     sort   uniq   yields the following output   VERSION conf mime conf data pages playground  data pages playground playground txt doku php inc auth php inc lang no lang php lib plugins acl remote php lib plugins authplain auth php lib plugins usermanager admin php   rsync is run with theses arguments     -r to  recurse into directories    -c to also compare files of identical size and only  skip based on checksum  not mod-time  amp  size     -n to  perform a trial run with no changes made   and --out-format   n  to  output updates using the specified FORMAT   which is   n  here for the file name only   The output  list of files  of rsync in both directions is combined and sorted using sort  and this sorted list is then condensed by removing all duplicates with uniq

[linux] diff to output only the file names

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