Compare directories; Show files in one directory that aren't in the other?

[david503]

I have two directories, I want to know which files are in either directory that aren't in the other, including subdirs.

So basically a diff, but with directories. Actually I thought of just running find ./ -name "." > dir1.txt and just running a diff but- diff will "complain" (wrong word) about two lines being different, which isn't what I want, you see- it would have so many false positives.

I figure it's a common need, so maybe there's a way in the terminal or some application? (I'm in Ubuntu 18.04 - in fact the reason I'm doing this as part of backing up to get out of the stone age)

Or do I have to just write a PERL (or whatever- PHP) script to recursively travers the dirs and etc etc etc.

Thanks.

[Dennis N]

Perhaps meld can help.

[MAFoElffen]

This is something that Midnight Commander excels at: <Cntrl><X>,<D>...

Or via CLI using diff

diff --brief --recursive <Dir1> <Dir2>
# Or more granularity by adding options or filters
diff --brief --recursive <Dir1> <Dir2> --exclude '*.log'

[ajgreeny]

Thunar, the file manager from Xfce can now also show directories side by side in two pane mode (F3) which i use quite a lot.
It is available in xfce-4.18, so needs a newer system than your 18.04 but could be useful in future.

[david503]

This is something that Midnight Commander excels at: <Cntrl><X>,<D>...

Or via CLI using diff

diff --brief --recursive <Dir1> <Dir2>
# Or more granularity by adding options or filters
diff --brief --recursive <Dir1> <Dir2> --exclude '*.log'

As I said in the op post, diff doesn't work because it returns too many false positives.

If the one directory is

filea
fileb
filec
filed
filee
filef
fileg
fileh
filei

And the other is:

filea
filec
filed
filee
filef
fileg
fileh
filei

(meaning without the "fileb"),

Then diff will give notifications about every line after filea.

When really what I want to know is that one directory has fileb and the other doesn't, you see?

[dragonfly41]

I use dual pane Krusader which I think can be configured to achieve that.

There are useractions and I have previously written two useractions which can

MeldFiles
MeldDirectories

or you can write your own custom scripts (useractions).

Here is a typical MeldFiles command:

meld %lCurrent% %rCurrent%

and MeldDirs

meld %lPath% %rPath%

See UserActions here...

https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/krusader/krusader//

https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/krus...eractions.html

Instead of Meld (CLI) you might run Python scripts.
I understand that you are looking for files which are not common.
Another idea is to use Albert. But Krusader allows two directories to be easily selected.
Krusader is similar to Midnight Commander as suggested earlier.

[david503]

Woa, ActionScript?! That's still alive? I used to write a whole lot of it before Flash and Flex died.

Yea I'm looking at some of these and it looks like it can only do one directory at a time. But yea, I'll take a look at those, thanks.

Oh and like I said- rolling my own code (in my case not python- PERL or PHP) is my last resort but I figured the task is commen enough that there might be something.

Thanks

(wow, Actionscript!)

[Holger_Gehrke]

Normally I'd do something like

(ls -1 firstdir;ls -1 seconddir)|sort|uniq -u

but this has the disadvantage that you can't tell in which directory the unique file(s) is(/are).
A bit of interactive python doesn't have this problem:

import os
# replace firstdir and seconddir with the paths to the directories in question
a=os.listdir('firstdir')
b=os.listdir('seconddir')
# this prints the files in firstdir that are not in seconddir
print([x for x in a if x not in b])
# the ones in seconddir but not in firstdir
print([x for x in b if x not in a])

Turning this into a script that gets arguments from sys.argv[] to use as firstdir and seconddir is left as an exercise to the reader.

Holger

[oygle]

I have two directories, I want to know which files are in either directory that aren't in the other, including subdirs.

Beyond Compare can do this, I've used it for years. The download is at https://www.scootersoftware.com/download/ , from memory it's a 30 day usage for the trial/free.

[TheFu]

My first thought was to use meld. I know that works.

Then I had an idea to use rsync in "dry-run" mode (think it is the -n option) which doesn't do anything. With the verbosity set correctly, the list of files to be transferred will be output. Then swap the source/target around and get the opposite list. Simple. Elegant. Effective.

        -n, --dry-run               perform a trial run with no changes made

OT: I love me some BASS!