diff to output only the file names

Question

I\'m looking to run a Linux command that will recursively compare two directories and output only the file names of what is different. This includes anything th

Answer 1

If you want to get a list of files that are only in one directory and not their sub directories and only their file names:

diff -q /dir1 /dir2 | grep /dir1 | grep -E "^Only in*" | sed -n 's/[^:]*: //p'

If you want to recursively list all the files and directories that are different with their full paths:

diff -rq /dir1 /dir2 | grep -E "^Only in /dir1*" | sed -n 's/://p' | awk '{print $3"/"$4}'

This way you can apply different commands to all the files.

For example I could remove all the files and directories that are in dir1 but not dir2:

diff -rq /dir1 /dir2 | grep -E "^Only in /dir1*" | sed -n 's/://p' | awk '{print $3"/"$4}' xargs -I {} rm -r {}