It doesn't make it recursive, but we can choose from quick, size only, and thorough options based on time stamps, size, and contents respectively.įile comparisons in Vifm are more advanced than directory comparisons. Different options will be displayed when they're selected − To compare two directories in Midnight Commander, use either the command/compare directory menu option or the ctrl+x d keyboard combination. Terminal File Managersįile manager directory comparison features are also available in some file managers. We should remember that diff utility compares files using their contents, which could cause a significant delay when comparing large amounts of files. log files from the example shown above, we would run the following command − diff - brief - recursive Dir1 Dir2 - exclude '*.log' Files Dir1 / file02 and Dir2 / file02 differ log differįiles Dir1 / file02 and Dir2 / file02 differįiles Dir1 / file03 and Dir2 / file03 differįiles Dir1 / subdir1 / file12 and Dir2 / subdir1 / file12 differįiles Dir1 / subdir2 / file22 and Dir2 / subdir2 / file22 differĪnother useful option for comparing two lists is −−exclude, which lets us filter out elements from one list that we're not interested in. Here are some examples of commands that help you view the contents of different types of file formats and directories recursively − diff - brief - recursive Dir1 Dir2 Files Dir1 / client. There are lots of options, but two of them are most useful for our case. Used for comparing files, the diff utility is able to compare directories as well as files. We almost always can use an old Unix utility called diff to see how two files (or directories) are different. So we can easily compare the results from different comparison tools. Samples must contain at least two kinds of files: identical ones (same file name, size, etc.) and different ones (different file names, sizes, etc.). We'll create some sample directories inside the /temp directory for this tutorial.

We'll also see some of the most commonly used commands and their options. There are different methods we can use to compare directory listings. We’ll learn how we can use the command line to perform directory comparisons. For example, we normally want to figure out what's different from a previous situation when something goes wrong. Many different factors make us want to find out whether there really is a difference between two things. It's quite common for people to compare two directories.

Windows compare two directories