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?
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Answer
Try:
diff --brief --recursive dir1/ dir2/
Or alternatively, with the short flags -qr
:
diff -qr dir1/ dir2/
If you also want to see differences for files that may not exist in either directory:
diff --brief --recursive --new-file dir1/ dir2/ # with long options diff -qrN dir1/ dir2/ # with short flag aliases