Are there any Linux/Unix tools which find all the files in one directory not present in another? Basically I'm looking for diff which works on the output of ls.
Short and sweet scripts are also appreciated.
diff
does this already:
diff dir1 dir2
Example output:
Only in dir1: some_file.txt
Only in dir1: some_other_file.txt
Only in dir2: third_file.txt
diff dir1 dir2 | grep "Only"
Sep 1, 2010 at 16:12
Bash:
diff <(cd dir1; ls) <(cd dir2; ls)
Compare only the filenames - not the contents of the files.
ls
since it's only getting a list of files and not looking at fields in output such as ls -l
. It's also not parsing the names themselves so special characters aren't a problem except for newlines. But diff is going to treat parts of file names surrounding newlines separately anyway (even this answer with grep Only
fails in this regard).
Jun 28, 2022 at 21:56
Like people told you here, you can use DIFF in various usage variations. Or you just use dirdiff
instead, which is meant for what you're trying! :-)
But if you want to keep some directories in sync then you really should take a look on rsync
.
Regards
If you are wanting to do this through all sub directories as well, a good way to do it is:
diff --brief -r dir1/ dir2/
I prefer using brief, but you can leave that out if you want.
dir2/
to a new folder? dir3/
for i in $(ls -1 directory1); do if (test -f directory2/$i) then echo $i; fi; done
Dennis Williamson had a good answer, but I needed to do this recursively. GNU findutils 4.7.0 doesn't sort its output, so here's what I used
diff <(cd $dir1; find | sort) <(cd $dir2; find | sort)
To do this only one way, and produce a list of files, I used this:
diff <(cd $dir1; find | sort) <(cd $dir2; find | sort) \
| grep '< ./' | sed "s,< ./,$dir1/,"
For this to work properly, neither $dir1 nor $dir2 should include the trailing slash.
This works..
ls -a1 /dir1 | sort > /tmp/1
ls -a1 /dir2 | sort > /tmp/2
diff /tmp/1 /tmp/2
untested:
find /dir/A -printf "%P" | while read f; do
if [ ! -e "/dir/B/$f" ]; then
echo $f
fi
done