Tool to compare OMVS Directories

arunkumar atr · New User Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 19 Location: Chennai

Hi all,

Is there any tool or IBM command to compare two directories in OMVS, and display the differences in tree structure?

We tried "diff" and "dircmp" commands, since the differences are very large we are not able to sort it out.

Kindly share your ideas for this.

Regards,
Arun

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:14 pm

if the differences are large,
whatever tool You will use, You will face issues

if You just need to find a match/nomatch the -q flag will do that

arunkumar atr · New User Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 19 Location: Chennai

Thanks for ur reply.

I didnt find -q flag with either diff nor dircmp commands, can u pls help me in this..

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 9:47 pm

sorry my bad... I just checked and the -q flag is not supported

omvs utilities are a murky issue..
I assumed a direct GNU origin, but unfortunately it is not so.

all depends on what kind of comparison You want to carry on

a reasonable approach would be to redirect a ls -l -r of both directories to two files
after that write a script rexx,perl,python, anything You are comfortable with
to process the two files pruning them of the excess info

but if the directories contain lots of elements, lots of differences...
You will always face a disturbing task

if the task is repetitive it might be worth to search and install a better suited tool

dick scherrer · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 6:37 am

Hello,

Don't know about omvs, but on Unix systems, we used to issue an LS on each directory and write the outputs to separate files rather than the terminal. Then we'd compare these 2 files.

If the number of files in both directories is very large and you expect many differences, you could use more than 1 LS command with a mask/wildcard (i.e. a* then b* or whatever would work better for you.

If there is expected to be a very high number of mis-matches, what good in the compare? We did this when a mis-match was an error and needed to be resolved. We didn't compare "things" that we knew did not match.

arunkumar atr · New User Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 19 Location: Chennai

Thanks Dick.. If we cant find out the tool to compare, then manual checking(ls) is the last option. Hope we will get IT..

dick scherrer · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 9:19 pm

Hello,

mtaylor · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 8:26 pm

The general tree diffing problem is still open (directory structure is a tree), there are no 'good' solutions for this. Most research in this area is carried out under the 'xml diffing' since xml is also a tree structure. That said, there are a couple of utilities around for xml diffing, Formating the directory listings as xml then run thru an xml diff may prove a fruitful approach.