In nawfer writes:

> is possible with a command or only with external tool?

That depends on what you mean by "compare directories". Are you
comparing only filenames? Dates and sizes? Subdirectories?

If you're just comparing filenames, then you could do a simple ls on
each directory, save those results to a file, and run "diff" on the two
files.

--
John Gordon A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs
gordon@panix.com B is for Basil, assaulted by bears
-- Edward Gorey, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies"

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:55:43 +0000, John Gordon wrote:

> In nawfer
> writes:
>
>> is possible with a command or only with external tool?
>
> That depends on what you mean by "compare directories". Are you
> comparing only filenames? Dates and sizes? Subdirectories?
>
> If you're just comparing filenames, then you could do a simple ls on
> each directory, save those results to a file, and run "diff" on the two
> files.

You don't even need to save the results. This works in bash:

diff <(ls foodirectory) <(ls bardirectory)

It's called process substitution. See the Advanced Bash-Scripting guide,
Chap. 22, at http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/process-sub.html

2007-05-18, 11:08(+01), Barney:
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:55:43 +0000, John Gordon wrote:
>
>> In nawfer
>> writes:
>>
>>> is possible with a command or only with external tool?
>>
>> That depends on what you mean by "compare directories". Are you
>> comparing only filenames? Dates and sizes? Subdirectories?
>>
>> If you're just comparing filenames, then you could do a simple ls on
>> each directory, save those results to a file, and run "diff" on the two
>> files.
>
> You don't even need to save the results. This works in bash:
>
> diff <(ls foodirectory) <(ls bardirectory)

Only on systems that support /dev/fd/ or named pipes.

Note that that (non-standard) feature comes from ksh and can be
found in bash and zsh (though not all ksh
versions/implementations support and ksh won't use named pipes
for that).

On systems that have /dev/fd/, you can do write it in
standard sh as:

ls foo | { ls bar | diff /dev/fd/3 -; } 3<&0

--
Stéphane