simple shell script to compare two dirs recursively

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2020 21:16:38 +0000, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
>I'm not sure what behaviour you expect but with FreeBSD diff if you
>have a directory full of files and a directory full of symlinks to the
>same files (with the same names) then diff will find them to be
>identical, it simply reads contents and does not notice the symlink.

It does matter to either diff the soft link file itself or to diff
following the soft link. It could depend on the origin. You might have
used a copy command with whatever option and later you diff with or
without all original mount points available, or ... There are a few
pitfalls related to dangling and not dangling links. However, you
easily end up with a diff of a real directory and a soft link file
without a valid path to the same directory.