I'm trying to compare two directories, each with some files and a subdirectory. Is there any way to run diff on these two folders, but not run it on the subdirectory? I've tried using diff -x'*/' foo bar, as well as a couple variants with backslashes to escape them, but no dice.
The actual name of the subdirectory can change, which is why I don't want to specify an exact name pattern.
Thanks!
If you are already diffing two specific directories, then I assume you know their names. In this case all you need to determine dynamically is the list of sub-directories contained in each.
Assuming you are in a parent directory; you have a structure like so, and you want to diff foo and bar but you want to exclude baz and quux:
+-- foo/
| |-- baz/
| |
| +-- file.txt
|
+-- bar/
|-- quux/
|
+-- file.txt
Using find:
find * -mindepth 1 -type d
Yields a list of subdirs inside foo and bar:
foo/baz
bar/quux
At this point you could write this to a temporary file:
find * -mindepth 1 -type d > exclude.txt
And then use diff's -X flag, which allows you to specifies a file containing patterns to exclude from a diff.
This won't quite work however, because you'll need to slice the parent dir name off each result. We can use cut to do this:
find * -mindepth 1 -type d | cut -d'/' -f2 > exclude.txt
This yields the following:
baz
quux
So you can now use:
diff -X exclude.txt foo bar
Or, if you don't want to create a temporary file you can do it as a one-liner:
diff -uX <(find * -mindepth 1 -type d | cut -d'/' -f2) foo bar
Hope this helps :)