Differencing Directories

[Christopher Browne]

On 1/16/06, William O'Higgins Witteman <william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 04:13:09PM -0500, Yanni Chiu wrote:
> >William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> >>Is there a stock tool for reporting the differences in directories?
> >
> >"diff -r" does recursive diff (i.e. diff's any subdirecties).
>
> Yes, but the output is decidedly unbeautiful.  I am not completely
> satisfied with dirdiff, but it seems to be a better choice than some of
> my options.  Tree is educational, and lends itself scriptable solutions,
> but for a rough overview it seems to be okay.  There are a lot of
> proprietary solutions out there for windoze I noticed, but because all
> the pieces are in place on Linux to do this yourself it seems less in
> demand.

The other alternative would be to use some SCM tool for the purpose.

In effect, check everything into a CVS/SVN/Darcs/Monotone/Arch
repository, and then do the equivalent of "cvs diff".  I don't think
you'll find this approach overly pretty for any of the SCM tools :-(. 
There's usually enough overhead/"base effort" in setting up a
repository that it won't, overall, be either quick or easy.

It strikes me as *possible* that Unison could be used for the purpose;
that is easy to configure, but has the demerit that finding useful
"diffs" may not be all that easy.  If the goal is to "unify" the
directories, Unison might nonetheless be a good choice...
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