I am in the process of moving my paperless documents to a new location, and am taking that opportunity to clean up my folder structure a little bit.
After getting everything set up in the new location, I wanted a way of comparing the contents to the old directory tree to see if there are any glaring omissions/red flags.
Compare Folders On The Mac
I found this helpful Macworld article that shows how to compare two folders using the Terminal in Mac OS X. The command is diff.
In its simplest form, you type the command like this:
diff -rq firstfolder secondfolder
I wanted a way to exclude those annoying .DS_Store files that Mac OS X throws everywhere, so this was my command. Substitute your own folders, of course.
diff -rq -x .DS_Store ~/Desktop/Docs ~/Docs
Here is a sample result.
As you can see, it displays the result in a nice easy to read format.
If you have a lot of changes to view, you can redirect the results to a text file and check later at your leisure. To do that, change the command to something like this:
diff -rq -x .DS_Store ~/Desktop/Docs ~/Docs > diff.txt ; open diff.txt
Compare Folders On Windows
I did find a discussion thread with a way to compare folders using the Windows command line, but from my research it seems like many people use the open source tool called WinMerge. The latter allows you to do comparisons using a GUI.
If you have another way that you compare folders in Mac or Windows, please leave a comment and let us know how you do it.
(Photo by TheBusyBrain)
