diff two directory trees quickly?

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1

Dear Opensuse users - using diff on a couple of full 4TB drives can be REALLY slow because it checksums all files to do the comparison. I’ve been reading the diff docs, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to compare two trees simply by the file attributes, which is to say, the system reported filesize, date, etc. Is there a way to do this? Someone suggested ls-ing the two directories into two files and diffing those two files…

Thank You,
Patti

2

I’m using the directory sync module in Krusader for such tasks - but never tried it on full 4TB drives…
You can fine tune the comparison in many ways and all that in a comfortable GUI.

Olaf

3

Thanks, Olaf - I will give Krusader a try.

4

How about rsync in dry-run mode?

Hendrik

5

If you compare two directory trees in order to (only) find duplicate files, then fudpes might be worth a try.

(If not, forget about this post.)

6

A Google search returns this interesting Stackoverflow thread which besides stating that there are an enormoug number of options, lists several command line and GUI (KDE) choices
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/776854/how-do-i-compare-two-source-trees-in-linux

TSU