rsnapshot-diff(1)

🦋 rsnapshot-diff — the glow-up inspector for your snapshots

okay bestie, so this page is rsnapshot-diff(1) from the rsnapshot-tools fam — yes, a real manual page, and yes, we're making it cute, but every single detail is staying. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

rsnapshot-diff — a utility for comparing the disk usage of two snapshots taken by rsnapshot. literally it's the "what changed tho" tool 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

rsnapshot-diff [-h|vVi] dir1 dir2

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

rsnapshot-diff is a companion utility for rsnapshot. it walks through two parallel directory structures and calculates the difference between them. 🧚 by default it's silent apart from displaying summary information at the end — but it can be made more verbose, no cap.

now, about that summary, and this is the part where people get confused so listen up 🙈 — "added" files may very well include files which at first glance also appear at the same place in the older directory structure. but because the files differ in some respect, they are different files. they have a different inode number. so consequently, if you use -v, most of its output may appear to be pairs of files with the same name being removed and added. that's not a bug, that's just inodes being inodes. 💀

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h (help) — displays help information. the "halp" button 🫶
• -H (human) — display more human-friendly numbers — as well as showing the number of bytes changed, also show MB and GB. so numbers you can actually feel ✨
• -i (ignore) — if verbosity is turned on, -i suppresses information about symlinks, directories, and special files. quiet little icon.
• -s (show size) — show the size of each changed file after the + or - sign. to sort the files by decreasing size, use this option and run the output through sort -k 2 -rn. slay, piping. 🔥
• -v (verbose) — be verbose. this will spit out a list of all changes as they are encountered, apart from symlink, as well as the summary at the end. it's giving "tell me everything" 👑
• -V (more verbose) — be more verbose — as well as listing changed files, unchanged files and symlinks will be listed too. main character energy, honestly.
• dir1 and dir2 — these are the only compulsory parameters, and should be the names of two directories to compare. their order doesn't matter — rsnapshot-diff will always compare the younger to the older, so files that appear only in the older will be reported as having been removed, and files that appear only in the younger will be reported as having been added. 🌈 iykyk, age order is handled for you.

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• rsnapshot

💀 BUGS 💀

please report bugs (and other comments) to the rsnapshot-discuss mailing list:

<http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rsnapshot-discuss>

pls do report them, the mailing list wants to hear from you 🥺

🌸 AUTHOR 🌸

David Cantrell <david@cantrell.org.uk>

🎀 COPYRIGHT 🎀

Copyright 2005-2010 David Cantrell

📜 LICENCE 📜

this program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. 🫶

this program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. see the GNU General Public License for more details. seriously, no warranty, bestie. 😭

you should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

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that's the whole page, diva. this was rsnapshot-tools action, dated 2025-07-10, and it's a rsnapshot-diff(1) moment — go compare some directories, you got this ⭐💜