\_ moin, moin, \_ \_ doing a couple of filesystems lists and then diffing them to make sure \_ they contain the same files. I'm running into a prob with files that have \_ either special chars or spaces embedded in the name/path. \_ \_ find wants to turn special chars into gobbly-gook, whereas tar renders the \_ escapes sequences. Use ls -b to turn the special chars into escape \_ sequences it also adds escapes for spaces, which tar doesn't do. \_ \_ Either of these probs trips up diff when verifying that the file lists are \_ the same. \_ \_ Anyone know a solution that doesn't require brute forcing with tools like \_ perl or sed/awk? Yeah. Wetware will do it just fine, particularly if assisted by a printer and a secretary. :-) Or try ediff-compare-buffers in emacs. Pretty light show; it'll at least page through the differences coherently for you. David