How do you diff a directory for only files of a specific type?

user_455767 0
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I have a question about the diff command if I want a recursive directory diff but only for a specific file type, how to do that?

I tried using the exclude option but can only use one pattern only:

$ diff /destination/dir/1 /destination/dir/2 -r -x *.xml

with the command I can only exclude xml file type, even though there are files in the folder image type (png, gif, jpg), txt, php, etc

how to diff only certain file types.

linux bash
9 Answers

I used the following command to find the diff of all *.tmpl files between DIR1 and DIR2. In my case this didn't yield any false positives, but it may for you, depending on the contents of your DIRS.

diff --brief DIR1 DIR2 | grep tmpl

user_38331660

Whilst it does not avoid the actual diff of other files, if your goal is to produce a patch file, or similar then you can use filterdiff from the patchutils package, e.g. to patch only your .py changes:

diff -ruNp /path/1 /path/2 | filterdiff -i "*.py" | tee /path/to/file.patch
user_2636710
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