With Unix find(1), how do I find files in one tree newer than counterparts in another tree?

Question

Let's say I have two directory structures:

/var/www/site1.prod
/var/www/site1.test

I want to use find(1) to see the files that are newer in /var/www/site1.test than their counterparts in /var/www/site1.prod.

Can I do this with find(1), and if so, how?

Answer 1

Hi,

I think you can't do it with find alone, but you can do something like

$ cd /var/www/site1.test
$ files=`find .`
$ for $f in $files; do
     if [ $f -nt /var/www/site1.prod/$f ]; then echo "$f changed!"; fi;
  done

Answer 2

If you look at the -fprintf option you should be able to create two finds that output into two files that list the files name and modification time. You should then be able to just diff the two files to see what has changed.

Answer 3

You also could use rsync -n

rsync -av -n /var/www/site1.test /var/www/site1.prod

should do it.

Answer 4

Using find,

cd /var/www/site1.test
find . -type f -print | while read file ; do
  [ "$file" -nt /var/www/site1.prod/"$file" ] && echo "File '$file' changed"
done

This will work with filenames containing blanks, as well as work for a large volume of files.

To distinguish between modified and missing files, as per Eddie's comments,

cd /var/www/site1.test
find . -type f -print | while read file ; do
  [ "$file" -nt /var/www/site1.prod/"$file" ] && reason=changed
  [ \! -e /var/www/site1.prod/"$file" ] && reason=created
  [ -n "$reason" ] && echo "$file $reason"
done

Cheers, V.

Answer 5

I understand that you specifically asked for newer, but I think it's always good to know all your options.

I would use diff -ur dir1 dir2.

Maybe the timestamp changed, maybe it didn't, but that doesn't necessarily tell you if the contents are the same. Diff will tell you if the contents changed. If you really don't want to see the contents use diff -rq to just see the files that changed.