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 -- INTERNET: bill at celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way Voice: (206) 236-1676 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820 Fax: (206) 232-9186 One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them. - Thomas Sowell