Comparing two directories using Perl

Question

i am new to Perl so excuse my noobness,

Here\'s what i intend to do.

$ perl dirComp.pl dir1 dir2

dir1 & dir2 are directory nam

Answer 1

The example you supplied using File::DirCompare works as intended.

Keep in mind that the callback subroutine is called for every unique file in each directory and for every pair of files which differ in their content. Having the same filename is not enough, the contents of each file in each directory must be exactly the same as well.

Furthermore, the cases in which you report "PASSED" aren't a success at all (by your definition) since they detail the cases in which a file exists in one of the directories, but not the other: meaning the directories' contents are not identical.

This should be closer to what you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::DirCompare;
use File::Basename;

sub compare_dirs
{
  my ($dir1, $dir2) = @_;
  my $equal = 1;

  File::DirCompare->compare($dir1, $dir2, sub {
    my ($a,$b) = @_;
    $equal = 0; # if the callback was called even once, the dirs are not equal

    if ( !$b )
    {
      printf "File '%s' only exists in dir '%s'.\n", basename($a), dirname($a);
    }
    elsif ( !$a ) {
      printf "File '%s' only exists in dir '%s'.\n", basename($b), dirname($b);
    }
    else
    {
      printf "File contents for $a and $b are different.\n";
    }
  });

  return $equal;
}

print "Please specify two directory names\n" and exit if (@ARGV < 2);
printf "%s\n", &compare_dirs($ARGV[0], $ARGV[1]) ? 'Test: PASSED' : 'Test: FAILED';