meld > diff

I recently was assigned a task at work that required finding the differences between one directory full of configuration files and another directory full of configuration files. Normally I’d use diff to look at the differences between the files, and figure out what has changed. With a directory of over 100 files, this wasn’t really feasible.

Enter meld, an awesomely awesome GUI-fied tool for Linux that not only lets you compare files, it also lets you compare directories full of files and three files at the same time. Very cool. It is also in the Ubuntu repos which is a plus.

In less time than it would take to interpret a diff on a single file, I quickly saw which files only existed in the original directory, which only existed in the new directory, and which were in both but different. The diff for each file was only a double-click away.

Pretty cool app. If you are on an Ubuntu based system check it out by running: sudo apt-get install meld