Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

jrv — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:20:02 GMT

@mark - why?

Robocopy does this internally and knows how to deal with long paths.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Mark Hellervik — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:40:00 GMT

I'm comparing two folders on different servers to make sure they robo copied correctly. I'm getting errors on path too long exception.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Ed Wilson — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:52:16 GMT

@Juan the arrow points to the "side" containing the unique file. Therefore, the three files are in the c:\fso folder, and not in the backup folder. The arrow points in the direction of the file. The reference object, c:\fso contains the three files. The difference object c:\fso_backup does not contain the files.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Juan — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:09:00 GMT

Hello,

Very useful, easy to use, thank you. I have a question, however.

Is it possible to show the full path of the compared items? Just showing the item names that are different works fine, but when comparing folders with many subfolders and files, it's a bit more time-consuming to actually find where the items are. The script above is telling me that they are different, and which ones are different, but not exactly where they are located.

Besides that, this works GREAT!

Thanks.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Ed Wilson — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:27:01 GMT

@Craig Lussier You are correct. Thank you for the links

@Klaus Schulte You are also correct. This is not going to be fast enough to work through thousands of files. What it IS good for is a simple comparison between two files. For example, I often will run a command against two servers, and then use Compare-Object to compare the output. This IS great to do when looking at the status of services between two "identical" servers for example.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Klaus Schulte — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:04:35 GMT

Hi Ed,

this is something that I usually do with a "real diff.exe" or my "totalcommander" which give me a list of different files. It's Ok to use powershell for that purpose and even for a more general purpose because we are not restricted to compare files ... it's all about objects!

But I'm afraid that we won't be able to use this technique comparing a large directory structure like a complete filesystem content which will give us hundreds of thousands of files! So ... if we restrict it to some thousand files it may work very well :-)

Klaus.

re: Easily Compare Two Folders by Using PowerShell

Craig Lussier — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 03:17:54 GMT

The alias for Compare-Object is diff. For more details/info on this cmdlet see technet.microsoft.com/.../dd347568.aspx and technet.microsoft.com/.../ee156812.aspx