Given two directory trees, how can I find out whic

Question

If I want find the differences between two directory trees, I usually just execute:

diff -r dir1/ dir2/

This outputs exactly what the differences are between corresponding files. I'm interested in just getting a list of corresponding files whose content differs. I assumed that this would simply be a matter of passing a command line option to diff, but I couldn't find anything on the man page.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The command I use is:

diff -qr dir1/ dir2/

It is exactly the same as Mark's :) But his answer bothered me as it uses different types of flags, and it made me look twice. Using Mark's more verbose flags it would be:

diff  --brief --recursive dir1/ dir2/

_{I apologise for posting when the other answer is perfectly acceptable. Could not stop myself... working on being less pedantic.}

Answer 2

Channel compatriot 'billings' (of freenode/#centos fame) shared his method with me:

diff -Naur dir1/ dir2

Including the final directory forward slash doesn't matter.

Also, it appears the -u option is not available on some older/server versions of diff.

The difference in diffs:

# diff -Nar /tmp/dir1 /tmp/dir2/
diff -Nar /tmp/dir1/file /tmp/dir2/file
28a29
> TEST

# diff -qr /tmp/dir1/ /tmp/dir2/
Files /tmp/dir1/file and /tmp/dir2/file differ

Answer 3

Meld is also a great tool for comparing two directories:

meld dir1/ dir2/

Meld has many options for comparing files or directories. If two files differ, it's easy to enter file comparison mode and see the exact differences.