How do diff over ssh?

Question

How do I diff files/folders across machines provided that the only connectivity available is ssh?

Answer 1

You can do it with Bash's process substitution:

 diff foo <(ssh myServer 'cat foo')

Or, if both are on remote servers:

diff <(ssh myServer1 'cat foo') <(ssh myServer2 'cat foo')

Answer 2

Finally I've found great solution: vimdiff

vimdiff /path/to/file scp://remotehost//path/to/file

thanks to http://linux.spiney.org/remote_diff_with_vim_and_ssh see also http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075 .

Answer 3

If you just want to see what files are different, rather than a diff of the actual files, then you can use rsync --dry-run

Answer 4

Use scp to bring the files to a common machine and diff them there?

Or, if you just want to know if the files are different or not, hash them with md5sum on each machine.

You could also look into something like SSHFS, but I don't know how well an algorithm like diff performs over that.

Answer 5

One way, if it is possible on your system would be to simply mount the remote filesystem with sshfs.

Answer 6

Here's another quick and dirty command line recipe:

ssh [login]@[host] "cat [remote file]" | diff - "[local file]"

Answer 7

Here is how I did it.

I used SFTP to the remote server and entered my username/pwd when prompted. Then I used the dir that was created in the .gvfs dir in my home directory in the diff command.

diff -r --brief /home/user dir/.gvfs/SFTP\ on\ freenas.local/path to dir/dir1 /path to local dir/dir2

Answer 8

This is a script that can help to diff local folder and remote folder.:

 #!/bin/bash

 LOCALFOLDER=/var/www/tee
 REMOTEFOLDER=$(ssh root@111.111.111.1 'ls -lA /hfs/tee'| grep -E '^total' | cut -d " " -f 2 > remotessh.txt)
 COMMAND=$(ls -lA $LOCALFOLDER | grep -E '^total' | cut -d " " -f 2 > localssh.txt)
 REM=$(cat remotessh.txt)
 LOCAL=$(cat localssh.txt)

 echo $LOCAL
 echo $REM

 if [ $REM -eq $LOCAL ]
 then
      echo Directories are the same
 else
      echo Directories are differnt
 fi

 #diff localssh.txt remotessh.txt | grep -E '^total' | cut -d " " -f 2