Check if all files in a directory exists elsewhere

Question

I'm about to remove an old backup directory, but before doing so I'd like to make sure that all these files exist in a newer directory.

Is there a tool for this? Or am I best off doing this "manually" using find, md5sum, sorting, comparing, etc?

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Clarification:

If I have the following directory listings

/path/to/old_backup/dir1/fileA
/path/to/old_backup/dir1/fileB
/path/to/old_backup/dir2/fileC

and

/path/to/new_backup/dir1/fileA
/path/to/new_backup/dir2/fileB
/path/to/new_backup/dir2/fileD

then fileA and fileB exists in new_backup (fileA in its original directory, and fileB has moved from dir1 to dir2). fileC on the other hand is missing in new_backup and fileD has been created. In this situation I'd like the output to be something like

fileC exists in old_backup, but not in new_backup.

Answer 1

Python has some nice standard library modules for this called dircmp/filecmp.

From Doug Hellmann's PyMOTW, This little bit of code gives you:

import filecmp

filecmp.dircmp('example/dir1', 'example/dir2').report()

Gives you:

diff example/dir1 example/dir2
Only in example/dir1 : ['dir_only_in_dir1', 'file_only_in_dir1']
Only in example/dir2 : ['dir_only_in_dir2', 'file_only_in_dir2']
Identical files : ['common_file', 'not_the_same']
Common subdirectories : ['common_dir']
Common funny cases : ['file_in_dir1']

Doug explains the full skinny on filecmp/dircmp way better than I can at:

http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/filecmp/

I like python for things like this because it ports much more easily between Linux/Windows/Solaris for me than anything shell based.

Answer 2

I'd make my own tool. Go the manual route for this one with some fancy find-ings:

find /oldbackup -exec basename {} ";" > /tmp/old.txt
find /newbackup -exec basename {} ";" > /tmp/new.txt
for $filename in `cat /tmp/old.txt`
do
    grep $filename /tmp/new.txt
    if [ "$?" -ne "0" ];
    then
       echo "$filename not in new backup"
    fi
done

That's incredibly sloppy, but the basic algorithm should be alright. You could also do some catting to figure out which files didn't have copies in both like so:

find /oldbackup -exec basename {} ";" > /tmp/old.txt
find /newbackup -exec basename {} ";" > /tmp/new.txt
cat /tmp/old.txt /tmp/new.txt | sort | uniq -c | grep -v 2

I can explain the bits and pieces if you need.

Answer 3

Use diff -uRN dir1 dir2

The diff will be empty if the files are perfect... Or it'll show!