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Comparing two directory structures, and reporting differences.

I have been tasked with comparing two similar directory structures, and producing a report of the differences between the two. Each one is mostly identical. There are thousands of directories and files, and maybe a few dozen that are not the same. Total file size is about 4Gb.

This strikes me as something that there is probably a free utility out there for, however a bit of searching did not reveal anything.

The host machine is a Windows 2008R2 server.

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Shaun Vermaak

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nobus

try free filesync : https://www.freefilesync.org/
it is better than winmerge -they say here : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14138855/tool-to-compare-directories-windows-7

Geert G

not free, but should a company task someone to do everything for free ?
beyond compare from http://www.scootersoftware.com

Andrew Leniart

I've used TreeSize Professional for years and have gotten so much value out of it, that I've always paid to keep it updated to it's latest major release versions as a result.

It will do what you want, with many different display and reporting options, as well as a whole lot more. Works very well on Windows Servers.

There is a fully functional 30 day trial available, so you could accomplish your task at no cost if a month is all you would need, but the purchase of it in order to continue using all of its pro features is well worth the money in my opinion.

I've found it to be very intuitive to use and an extremely powerful utility.

I am not affiliated in any way with jam-software.com - just a very happy user of this product.

Best..

Andrew

Mal Osborne

ASKER

Worked fine

Shaun Vermaak

Glad we could help.

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Chris Koknat

This answer is for Linux, not Windows

The open source tool 'dif' preprocesses directories of files with a wide variety of options
Afterwards, it runs the tools meld, gvimdiff, kdiff3, or kompare on these intermediate files
https://github.com/koknat/dif
Installation is not required, just copy the 'dif' executable

'dif dir1 dir2 -report <options>' will open a GUI to compare the directories

Any preprocessing option ( -comments, -white, -grep <regex>, -ignore <regex>, -search <regex> -replace <regex>, -replaceDates, etc ) can be used when comparing directories