Rsync compare files in two directories. list only files with difference

Question

I am trying to compare files in two directories using rsync.

I am using the command to achieve this is like:

rsync -avcn folder1/* folder2/

The problem is the result also list all the directories, whereas I want to display on the list of files with difference.

How I can achieve this.

Answer 1

The -a ( --archive ) flag is doing too much in this case; it also wants to make the directory metadata (permissions, timestamps, user, group) equal. Use -r instead; then rsync will only list those directories that exist in the folder1 but not in folder2 .

If you actually need some of the -a behaviour, or you want to ignore directories even if they don't exist in folder2 , you can filter the output through grep because directory names in rsync 's output conveniently end with a slash:

rsync -avcn folder1/* folder2/ | grep -v '/$'