Overview

A command line script for comparing two sets of directories and identifying which files are unique to one or other.

Its intended purpose was comparing directories after a major restructuring, to confirm that no files had been lost. It works well in a live environment and within a backup environment. It's aware of hardlinks, making it useful for comparing backups generated by backintime or rsnapshot.

Requirements

• composer
• git
• php (8.1 or higher)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/dharple/funique.git
cd funique
composer check-platform-reqs

If everything looks good after the previous check, install the project dependencies:

composer install --no-dev -o

If you have box installed globally, you can use that to build the utility:

box compile

Otherwise, we provide our own:

bin/compile

Finally, install the resulting PHAR file to /usr/local/bin:

sudo cp dist/funique.phar /usr/local/bin/funique

Comparing Directories

A basic run of the script looks like this:

funique --left /path/to/one/directory --right /path/to/another/directory

You can specify multiple left and right values, and each one will be considered part of that group.

You can redirect output, either with > or with --output. You can get additional information, including a progress bar, using -v. Enable debugging with -vvv to see each file as its processed.

Known Limitations

When compiling the utility using the provided script, bin/compile, you may see a message about compression failing. This is a soft failure, and does not stop the script from working. It's due to a limitation in the standard PHAR library. You can get around this by increasing your open files limit, or by using box.