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Questions tagged [diff]

Short for "difference" or "differencing", in computing, "diff" refers to a data comparison that calculates and displays the differences between two objects (usually files or directories).

98 questions
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compare tar content with local folder

I want to compare the content of a tar archive (backup of $HOME) with the content of my local $HOME to see whether there are files in the tar file which are not yet in the local filesystem. What is the best way to do that? I tried tar -dvf…
dAnjou
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Different files of two directories

There are two directories I'd like to compare. I tried diff but it includes the changes inside the files. All I want is something like this file a is just in /A file b is missing in /A file c changed directory d is missing in /A directory e is…
Wienczny
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Comparing OS configuration of two RHEL servers

What is the best way to compare the OS configuration of two (or more) RHEL 5.X servers? Are there any tools/packages available to do this? Note, I am mostly looking for tunables OS (kernel parameters, etc). I would like to add the reason why we…
Patrick
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rsnapshot diff between snapshots

I am using rsnapshot to manage incremental backups of some GNU/Linux servers. Although rsnapshot is delivered with a tool called rsnapshot-diff it just provide disk space statistics. The question is how to get a diff: new and deleted files, on a…
Angus Macyver
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How to export a specific virtualbox snapshot as a raw disk image

I created a Linux appliance for my friends. It's a small Ubuntu installation with Trac, lighthttp and ufw configured. I made it using VirtualBox. Now I want to export the latest snapshot version with everything secured and configured as a raw disk…
Bryan Hunt
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How to convert an rdiff delta file to a regular diff?

I need to diff two very large files, far too large for diff to handle. rdiff can produce a delta file for them in a few seconds, but I'd like to have a real diff as output. Is there an existing way of converting an rdiff delta to a regular diff?
uckelman
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How can I compare two directories to compare missing files, when the directories don't have the same structure?

I've been sent a HDD of new and updated files from an organisation that we are working with, but we already have most of the files sitting on our servers, and would like to update our local versions to match theirs. Normally, this would be a job for…
David Dean
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Check if all files in a directory exists elsewhere

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,…
aioobe
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Only show what's new in a file

I want to find out what was added to a log file between 2 tasks. Right now the way I do it is: content of test.log initially aaa bbb saving content of the log $ cp test.log test.log.before doing something content of test.log after doing…
Max
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Is there a diff/merge utility to compare binary files and synchronize data bit-by-bit in either direction based on differences in binary data?

I have a tricky dilemma. I've got some files on two different destination drives, copied from the same source drive. The source drive had been failing, so I used dd to copy over the data to one destination (with options conv=noerror,sync which fills…
purefusion
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How to create a chained differencing disk of another differencing disk in Virtual Box?

How to create a differencing disk (a chained one) from a disk that is already a differencing image? I would like to have: W2008 (base immutable) -> W2008+SQL2008 (differencing, with SQL installed) --- This I can do. ->…
WooYek
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How to see what Windows registry and file system changes happened after a software install?

I'm solving a problem - I'm installing software on Windows and it makes the system unstable for some reason. Windows starts crashing soon after. I want to know what changes it made to the registry and also to the file system. Does anyone know a tool…
Boda Cydo
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Bug in diff: wrong output for one-character files without newline

Consider this: echo -n a > /tmp/a echo -n b > /tmp/b diff -B /tmp/a /tmp/b Clearly, the two files are different, yet, diff seems to think that the files are identical. I've managed to reproduce this problem on Ubuntu 14.04 with diffutils 3.3, on…
Navin
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How can I get 'diff' to show only added and deleted lines? If diff can't do it, what tool can? Take-2

I have 2 sorted files produced by xxx>find /store -type f -print | sort > /tmp/invent.txt xxx>find /fbkup -type f -print | sort > /tmp/backup.txt I want from diff a file name list of files missing in /store which are still on /backup, without any…
Andreas
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Script to find out differences between local and remote file systems over SSH

I am looking for a script to find out the differences between a local and remote file systems (over SSH). Ideally the script should do the following: -browse the local file system for folders -find out whether folder is present on remote file system…
Max
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