1. Introduction §

Today I will introduce you to Diffoscope, a command line software to compare two directories. I find it very useful when looking for changes between two extracted tarballs, I use it to compare changes between two version of a program to see what changed.

Diffoscope project website

2. How to install §

On OpenBSD you can use "pkg_add diffoscope", on other systems you may have a package for it, but it could be installed via pip too.

3. Usage §

It is really easy to use, as parameter give the two directories you want to compare, diffoscope will then show the uid, gid, permissions, modification/creation/access time changes between the two directories.

The output on a simple example looks like the following:

--- t/
+++ a/
│   --- t/foo
├── +++ a/foo
│ @@ -1 +1 @@
│ -hello
│ +not hello
│ ├── stat {}
│ │ @@ -1 +1 @@
│ │ -1043 492483 -rw-r--r-- 1 solene wheel 1973218 6 "Mar 20 18:31:08 2021" "Mar 20 18:31:14 2021" "Mar 20 18:31:14 2021" 16384 4 0 t/foo
│ │ +1043 77762 -rw-r--r-- 1 solene wheel 314338 10 "Mar 20 18:31:08 2021" "Mar 20 18:31:18 2021" "Mar 20 18:31:18 2021" 16384 4 0 a/foo

Diffoscope has many flags, if you want to only compare the directories content, you have to use "--exclude-directory-metadata yes".

Using the same example as previously with --exclude-directory-metadata yes, it looks like:

--- t/
+++ a/
│   --- t/foo
├── +++ a/foo
│ @@ -1 +1 @@
│ -hello
│ +not hello