On Thu, Oct 23, 2008, MHR wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Bill Campbell centos@celestial.com wrote:
A somewhat cleaner way of doing this is to use the ``comm'' command as it generates a straight list as opposed to diff which requires parsing the output.
But comm also "requires" that the data be sorted. Otherwise you can get spurious output because lines that are actually the same but do not appear in order will show up as differences.
That's certainly true, which is why my solution, and the one with diff both sorted the find output before the comparison.
I use the ``comm'' solution quite frequently for this, and to do things like compare ``rpm -ql packagename'' with ``rpm -qpl'' to be sure that modifications I have made to a package have not added or lost something compared to the installed version.
I find ``comm'' to be a very useful program that people may not know of, and I use it in Linux/Unix classes I teach to show people how CLI programs may make things much easier than GUIs.
I'd go with the rsync solutions already posted, but that's just me.
Bill