Directory and file comparison tool for X?

[Norberto Meijome]

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:11:18 +1000 (EST)
Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:

> On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Norberto Meijome wrote:
> 
>  > On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:56:17 +1000 (EST)
>  > Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
> 
>  > >  > I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to compare directories
>  > >  > (recursively) showing what files are different,etc. meld
>  > >  > ( textproc/meld ) can do this to some extent, showing missing
>  > >  > files,etc, but not showing what files are different withoug having to
>  > >  > open each file and do a diff.
>  > > 
>  > > Well of course 'diff -r dir1 dir2 | less' does that well in an xterm :)
>  > > 
>  > 
>  > yeah, but it's just way too verbose. something that allows very quick
>  > determination of differences / missing files, transfer them from one tree
>  > to another,etc. Specially for LARGE trees.
> 
> A job for rsync, perhaps, if you want to automatically syncronise the
> trees, rather than just review the diffs?  (caveat: I know very close to
> nothing about rsync, beyond having reading its man xty-x times :)
> 
>  > > But I guess you're after a more pointy clicky solution :)
>  > 
>  > not because of point+click per se, but yes for faster overview of things.
> 
> I recall a wonderful OS/2 tool for this purpose .. ahem, moving on .. 
> 
>  > > % diff bittorrent/ bittorrent2/
>  > > diff bittorrent/differingfile bittorrent2/differingfile
>  > > 1,2c1,3
>  > > < this one in bittorrent dir
> [..]
>  > 
>  > yeah.. i tried this with 2 src trees with over 1.2 K  files each... it was
>  > way too much to digest quickly :D
> 
> Ok, my last shot with good ol' diff, on the same filesets (this is news
> to me too; I haven't explored many of the diff options much before): 
> 
> % diff -rq bittorrent/ bittorrent2/
> Files bittorrent/differingfile and bittorrent2/differingfile differ
> Only in bittorrent2/: not_in_1
> Only in bittorrent/: not_in_2
> 
> For moving files between two trees, looks like a bit of scripting on -q
> (--brief) output may get you there? Hopefully someone has a better idea? 
> 
> cheers, Ian
> 

:) thanks mate. 
as you can see, there seem to be several tools that do parts of
it, few that combine them. i may not want to sync all the tree of course (hence
rsync good for quick comparison , etc.etc). 

xxdiff is quite good close to what i was after (despite the UI not being the
most up to date,still works quite well).  give it a try, make sure you enable
recursiveness ;) 

Beto