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  • Excellent answer. In rsync's output it's hard to notice the deleting... text but it's probably one of the better ways to compare files while still maintaining speed. Other' answers here are faster when diffing files isn't required...as in OP's example, but I really like this one. Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 20:11
  • This is what I was after. I had some files with different sizes in a massive pair of directory trees, and I wanted to know which ones. This achieved that aim in mere seconds.
    – suprjami
    Commented Nov 30, 2015 at 12:13
  • Maybe it is a good idea to run it with a user that has a read only access. Like sudo -u nobody rsync -nav --delete d1 d2 provided that the flags for 'others' allow reading. Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 15:36
  • When running this solution I got "building file list...done\n sent X bytes received Y bytes Z bytes/sec total size is A speedup is B" (where I substituted XYZAB for numbers). Does that mean that everything was identical? Since it didn't mention anything more specific? Thanks in advance
    – Scott H
    Commented Jan 4, 2018 at 14:17
  • To answer my own question, I experimented adding different files to each, and it appears that no specific files/dirs mentioned in the output means they are all the same.
    – Scott H
    Commented Jan 4, 2018 at 20:34