title: Comparing folder structure in two environments
body: <p>Are there any good tools for comparing two folder structures (files included) between two environments?</p>
  
  <p>i.e. comparing a dev computer with production</p>
  
  <p>Edit:</p>
  
  <p>A note on some lessons learned: <code>dir /s /o:N &gt;&gt; output.txt</code> works well in conjunction with a text comparison tool (I used WinMerge), but the filesystem does appear to matter. NTFS against FAT32 doesn't work well, as one scans the folders in reverse alphabetical order, and the other doesn't. To solve this issue, I copied the files from the FAT32 to an NTFS drive.</p>
  
  <p>Also, DiffMerge is nice, but slow. It actually hung when run on the server (that's where I had access to both sets of files) to a point that I had to force a quit.</p>
  
  <p>I'm sure others have thoughts on doing this with *NIX. Probably a similar technique like <code>ls -alR &gt; output</code></p>
  
  <p>It's still pretty manual, but it works well.</p>
  
  <p>Just keep in mind that the times on the folders will more than likely be different, so you may want to use a regex to replace them and make them more consistent, since that's fairly benign (I used <code>[\d]{2}/[\d]{2}/[\d]{4}[\s]*[\d]{2}\:[\d]{2}\sAM[\s]*\&lt;DIR\&gt;</code> and <code>[\d]{2}/[\d]{2}/[\d]{4}[\s]*[\d]{2}\:[\d]{2}\sPM[\s]*\&lt;DIR\&gt;</code>).</p>