On 2026-03-02, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/2/26 8:17 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2026-03-02, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I was hoping I could do a whole directory not each individual file. >> Do you only want to know if the _directory_ has changed and not if the >> contents of any file has changed? That's possible, but it might >> require a small C program: I can't think of existing utility that does >> that. > > What I was hoping, I could tell it to generate a checksum for a entire > directory, the way it does for a file.
It's not clear what you mean by "a entire directory". It's quite doable to create a checksum for a directory, but I don't think it's as useful as you hope. It would only tell you if the _directory_ has changed (files have been removed, added, or renamed). It would not tell you if any of the files' contents or metadata has changed. > Then I do the same thing on my main version and see if my main > version matches the backup version. I think that even if this could > be done, it would take days to generate it. I was hoping for > something that takes less than a hour at least, maybe even 15 or 20 > minutes. I'm getting the idea that what I'm wanting could take days > or longer to perform. 42TBs of data is a lot to check. Some > 64,000 files. If you want to calculate a checksum of all of the files in a directory, then checksumming X GB of data is going to take pretty much the same amount of time whether you do it all at once or in chunks. I don't see what you think you're going to gain by having a single checksum vs. one per file. > I could just copy Franks script over and run it for the files. It would > report any errors. I'm sure that would take several days, maybe even a > week or more, to run on all those files tho. If you don't care about changes to the files, and only want to know if _directories_ have changed, that will certainly be way faster. -- Grant
