Diff files present in two different directories

Question

I have two directories with the same list of files  I need to compare all the files present in both the directories using the diff command  Is there a simple command line option to do it  or do I have to write a shell script to get the file listing and then iterate through them

User · Answer

Diff has an option -r which is meant to do just that   diff -r dir1 dir2

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If you are only interested to see the files that differ  you may use   diff -qr dir one dir two   sort   Option  q  will only show the files that differ but not the content that differ  and  sort  will arrange the output alphabetically

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You can use the diff command for that   diff -bur folder1  folder2    This will output a recursive diff that ignore spaces  with a unified context    b flag means ignoring whitespace u flag means a unified context  3 lines before and after  r flag means recursive

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In practice the question often arises together with some constraints  In that case following solution template may come in handy  cd dir1 find      -name    txt  -o -iname    md       xargs -i diff -u       dir2

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If it s GNU diff then you should just be able to point it at the two directories and use the -r option   Otherwise  try using  for i in    ls -d   dir1     do diff   i  dir2  done   N B  As pointed out by Dennis in the comments section  you don t actually need to do the command substitution on the ls  I ve been doing this for so long that I m pretty much doing this on autopilot and substituting the command I need to get my list of files for comparison   Also I forgot to add that I do   ls  to temporarily disable my alias of ls to GNU ls so that I lose the colour formatting info from the listing returned by GNU ls

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diff can not only compare two files  it can  by using the -r option  walk entire directory trees  recursively checking differences between subdirectories and files that occur at comparable points in each tree     man diff       -r  --recursive         Recursively compare any subdirectories found

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If you specifically don t want to compare contents of files and only check which one are not present in both of the directories  you can compare lists of files  generated by another command   diff  lt  find DIR1 -printf   P n    sort   lt  find DIR2 -printf   P n    sort    grep     lt  gt      -printf   P n  tells find to not prefix output paths with the root directory   I ve also added sort to make sure the order of files will be the same in both calls of find   The grep at the end removes information about identical input lines

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Try this    diff -rq  path to folder1  path to folder2

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Here is a script to show differences between files in two folders  It works recursively  Change dir1 and dir2    search     for i in  1    do   -f   i     amp  amp   diff   1   i         2   i          echo  files   1   i         2   i           -d   i     amp  amp  search   1   i         2   i        done    search  dir1   dir2

[unix] Diff files present in two different directories

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