use diff to find and sync

Posted under » Linux on 04 August 2026

We have seen diff in action before but lets dive deeper.

You can use diff for quick code comparison but I recommend that you use meld.

I now mainly use diff to compare file contents in a directory when I do git or svn.

diff --brief --recursive --exclude='*pyc' --exclude='static' /home/ubuntu/heh/ /home/ubuntu/hoh > maindiff.txt

In this command, --brief --recursive is also equal -qr. Exclude 'static' means exclude directories that looks like /static/.

The output will look like this.

Files /home/les/logs/learnerapp.log and /home/dasboot/logs/learnerapp.log differ
Only in /home/les/: .git

With that I can change and make sh files like

cp /home/les/logs/learnerapp.log /home/dasboot/logs/learnerapp.log
git add /home/dasboot/logs/learnerapp.log