diff folders

November 29, 2020

When stupidly changing sources on a remote system and on the local system, so you cannot easily copy using rsync for example, I do the following manual steps to get things in order again.

Mount the remote source folder (/home/username/blog.git) locally over ssh using sshfs to the local system (/mnt/blog):

$ sshfs username@remote_host:/home/username/blog.git /mnt/blog

Then I comapre the remote folder (available locally in /mnt/blog) to the local version in ~/blog.

$ diff -rq -x venv -x __pycache__ /mnt/blog/ ~/blog/

diff considers every folder recursively (-r) and gives a brief output (-q).
diff will ingore two folders:

• venv
• __pycache__

To compare the actual changes and adapt the files I use vimdiff. Imagine a change in ~/blog/app.py:

$ vimdiff /mnt/blog/app.py ~/blog/app.py