File System Help. Or comparing folders in an OS.

2868

OK.The family company is a document archival company. They archive documents (Hard copy to Electronic Copy) each hard copy yields two files a high res .tif, and a PDF. Here's the rub. One of the employees just told me he has two folders with about 40,000 files in each. There is a 6 document disparity between the folders.

Is there a way to tell which documents are missing? I guess an easy way to spot the differences between the folders?

2868

Um, maybe I solved it my ownself. An application called Windiff.

I should also be clear, this is the Windows OS:Vista. I can do this in the Mac OS with the diff command in the terminal. What I'd like is the ability to do this in windows without a third party application.

Huchel

You could try different usages of the "fc" or "comp" command in a cmd window on vista. I know it's normally used to compare two files, but I believe there is a way to compare multiple files and directories too.

Sir Headless VII

windiff should do that for you. might take a while but its a good aplication.

Geek Lord

you can output a DOS 'dir' command to a text file on the two folders you want to compare, with ordering if you want, so something like "dir /b /on > folderA.txt" and folderB.txt.

The /b gives you only file names, no date, size, etc. and /on orders filenames by alphabetical order.

Then you run "fc folderA.txt folderB.txt > folderdiff.txt", and for every difference, will output something like this:

Comparing files folderA.txt and folderB.txt
***** folderA.txt
dir.txt
find
***** folderB.txt
dir.txt
dir2.txt

---

> this is what is different
find
*****

edit: also don't be afraid of WinDiff, its an official MS application that's part of some Windows Advance Support tools package that you can download straight from microsoft. It doesn't even need to be installed, it can be run as-is once extracted (I think?) and will be much easier than what I did above.

Ruckus

I'd probably just use the fc command line utility.

2868

Thanks for all the help everyone. We went with Windiff. We just had to be careful because of the sensitive nature of the business, we try to do it within the OS if we can, rather than use unvetted utilities.