Comparing folder structure in two environments

Question

Are there any good tools for comparing two folder structures (files included) between two environments?

i.e. comparing a dev computer with production

Edit:

A note on some lessons learned: dir /s /o:N >> output.txt works well in conjunction with a text comparison tool (I used WinMerge), but the filesystem does appear to matter. NTFS against FAT32 doesn't work well, as one scans the folders in reverse alphabetical order, and the other doesn't. To solve this issue, I copied the files from the FAT32 to an NTFS drive.

Also, DiffMerge is nice, but slow. It actually hung when run on the server (that's where I had access to both sets of files) to a point that I had to force a quit.

I'm sure others have thoughts on doing this with *NIX. Probably a similar technique like ls -alR > output

It's still pretty manual, but it works well.

Just keep in mind that the times on the folders will more than likely be different, so you may want to use a regex to replace them and make them more consistent, since that's fairly benign (I used [\d]{2}/[\d]{2}/[\d]{4}[\s]*[\d]{2}\:[\d]{2}\sAM[\s]*\<DIR\> and [\d]{2}/[\d]{2}/[\d]{4}[\s]*[\d]{2}\:[\d]{2}\sPM[\s]*\<DIR\>).

Answer 1

I use Diff merge (http://www.sourcegear.com/diffmerge/ - it has a free version) for comparing folder structures on Windows

Answer 2

For a tool that runs on Windows (but can work against Linux samba shares), try BeyondCompare.

Answer 3

Option 1)

Mount one of the machines on the other, then use some standard directory compare utility.

Option 2)

Use rsync --dry-run and use the output in some way.

Option 3)

Generate hashes (e.g. sha256) of the files on each side, then compare the lists.

Answer 4

One windows. Use your favorite diff tool on the files generated from this cmd.

Run this from the folders you wish to compare.
c:\somefolder>dir /s > searchResult.txt