compare 2 files with a fallout report

[Vdubjunkie]

I know.. Im on a marathon tonight. What I'm looking for is a way to compare two files with a fallout report.

I have done a

ls > dir.txt

to several directories, and would like to figure out exactly what one dir has that the other does not. I don't care about also vice versa, just one dir to the other.

I've looked through some of the compare type commands and just don't seem to be able to make sense of any of them for this purpose.

 

as always.. help is greatly appreciated!

[Guest G3ck0G33k]

I hope I understood what you wanted to to...

 

You could use either TkDiff or Kompare; both are found in Applications > Development > Tools.

 

Open two "dir.txt" files (e.g. from /home/user/crap/dir.txt and /home/user/misery/dir.txt) and see how they differ.

[aru]

man diff

 

diff can also compare directories directly w/o the need of appending their contents to a file. diff dir1/ dir2/

 

is that what you wanted?

[Vdubjunkie]

the command line is my preference, so diff may be my ticket..

however, the dir/ directly may be tricky. It is from two machines on different networks. In fact one is a doze box.

I'll try plugging away with man diff some more and see if I can't figure it out.

 

Thanks.

[aru]

I see, then if the next step is to update someting after the comparation, then you can avoid it at all and use rsync.

 

Btw, search for a clever script from theYinYeti here that does it using plain unix tools.