Best way to compare (diff) a full directory structure?

Solution 1:

The tool your looking for is rdiff. It works like combining rsync and diff. It creates a patch file which you can compare, or distribute.

Solution 2:

Some people want to compare filesystems for different reasons, so I'll write here what I wanted and how I did it.

I wanted:

To compare the same filesystem with itself, i.e., snapshot, make changes, snapshot, compare.
A list of what files were added or removed, didn't care about inner file changes.

What I did:

First snapshot (before.sh script):

find / -xdev | sort > fs-before.txt

Second snapshot (after.sh script):

find / -xdev | sort > fs-after.txt

To compare them (diff.sh script):

diff -daU 0 fs-before.txt fs-after.txt | grep -vE '^(@@|\+\+\+|---)'

The good part is that this uses pretty much default system binaries. Having it compare based on content could be done passing find an -exec parameter that echoed the file path and an MD5 after that.

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