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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Diff has an option -r which is meant to do just that.

diff -r dir1 dir2

Answer 4

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.

...

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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" ] && (diff "$1/${i##*/}" "$2/${i##*/}" || echo "files: $1/${i##*/}   $2/${i##*/}"); [ -d "$i" ] && search "$1/${i##*/}" "$2/${i##*/}"; done }; search "dir1" "dir2" )

Answer 7

Try this:

diff -rq /path/to/folder1 /path/to/folder2