What is the best way to compare 2 folder trees on windows

Question

I m moving a repository from sourcesafe to subversion and I need to ensure that vital points are equal  Is it any existing command   tool for windows that allows me to compare two folder trees that they are equal  has equal folder structure and files of same content   The ideal will be something command-line like   some cool compare c  current vss c  current svn -exclude  svn   vspscc   scc   Is it some tool   command exist or I need to write a script of my own

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Beyond compare allows you to do that and much more      It s one of those tools I can t live without  Take a look here for a reference on the scripting options

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SyncToy is a free application from Microsoft with a  Preview  mode for comparing two paths  For example     You can then choose one of three modes   Synchronize    Echo  and  Contribute   to resolve the differences   Lastly  it comes with SyncToyCmd for creating and synchronizing folder pairs from the CLI or a Scheduled Task

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Like the OP  I was looking for a Windows folder diff tool  in particular one that could handle very large trees  100s of Gigabytes of data   Thanks Lieven Keersmaekers for the pointer to BeyondCompare  which I found to be VERY fast  roughly 10-100 times faster  than my previous old school tool windiff   BTW  BeyondCompare does have a command line mode in addition to the GUI

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Did you try  https   www araxis com merge index en It allows to visualize changes and selectively merge specific differences in files and folders

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You can use git for exactly this purpose  Basically  you create a git repository in folder A  the repo is in A  git   then copy A  git to B  git  then change to B folder and compare simply by running git diff  And the --exclude functionality can be achieved with  gitignore   So  sticking to your example  but using bash shell on Linux      Create a Git repo in current vss pushd current vss printf   svn n  vspscc n  scc   gt  gt   gitignore git init  amp  amp  git add    amp  amp  git commit -m  initial  popd    Copy the repo to current svn and compare cp -r current vss  git  current svn  pushd current svn git diff

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As I am reluctant to install new programs into my machine  this PowerShell script  from Hey  Scripting Guy  Blog  helped me solve my problem  I only modified the path to suit my case     fso   Get-ChildItem -Recurse -path F  songs  fsoBU   Get-ChildItem -Recurse -path D  songs Compare-Object -ReferenceObject  fso -DifferenceObject  fsoBU

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You could also execute tree  gt  tree txt in both folders and then diff both tree txt files with any file based diff tool  git diff

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If you can use a GUI tool  the best I tried is WinMerge - open source   If not  then diff is your friend

[comparison] What is the best way to compare 2 folder trees on windows?

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