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 co

Answer 1

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.