[CentOS] compare directories

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008, MHR wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Bill Campbell <centos at 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
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