verifying files

[Alan Dayley]

* Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote on 9/17/05 12:59:
> I'm thinking that I don't entirely trust what I 'exported' from my iPod
> and want to check it against the music data from my Windows
> 
> What I want to compare is the entirety of the music data - though the
> file names and folder names are different, the data within them should
> be entirely unchanged.

I see the different file aned directory names as a difficulty here.  Automated tools won't know what to compare if the names are different.

> so I thought I could md5sum a directory tree but it only works on
> files. ;-(

You could tar or zip the tree to checksum one file but the sums will be different because of the name changes.
 
> The data amount should be slightly over 3 Gb in both cases...
> 
> [root at srv1 home]# du -s /home/music
> 18759612        /home/music
> 
> [root at srv1 home]# du -s /home/samba/profiles/craig/My\ Documents/My\
> Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music
> 
> 18776304        /home/samba/profiles/craig/My Documents/My
> Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
> 
> Not the same ;-(

This is very likely because of filesytem differences as much as anything else.

> probably indicates a problem
> 
> Is there some absolute way to computer a checksum on a directory tree to
> compare the binary contents?

I don't know a simple solution to your dilema.  Someone better with scripting might have something.

Alan