Shell – Find differences of ownerships between two home folders

This can easily be done with diff. For example:

$ ls -l foo/
total 2132
-rwxr-xr-x 1 terdon terdon 1029624 Nov 18 13:13 bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 terdon terdon 1029624 Nov 18 13:13 bash2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 terdon terdon  118280 Nov 18 13:13 ls

$ ls -l bar/
total 1124
-rwxr-xr-x 1 terdon terdon 1029624 Nov 18 13:14 bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 terdon terdon  118280 Nov 18 13:14 ls

$ diff bar/ foo/
Only in foo/: bash2

In the example above, the foo/ and bar/ directories contain binary files and bash2 is only in foo/.

So, you could run something simple like:

$ diff bar/ foo/ && echo "The directories' contents are identical"

That will show you the different files, if any, or print "The directories' contents are identical" if they are. To compare subdirectories and any files they may contain as well, use diff -r. Combine it with -q to suppress the output for text files.

This puts folder A into folder B:

rsync -avu --delete "/home/user/A" "/home/user/B"  

If you want the contents of folders A and B to be the same, put /home/user/A/ (with the slash) as the source. This takes not the folder A but all of it's content and puts it into folder B. Like this:

rsync -avu --delete "/home/user/A/" "/home/user/B"

• -a Do the sync preserving all filesystem attributes
• -v run verbosely
• -u only copy files with a newer modification time (or size difference if the times are equal)
• --delete delete the files in target folder that do not exist in the source

Manpage: https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/rsync.html