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Thread ID: 94857 2008-11-15 01:15:00 A hash calculator for folder comparison. CCF (6760) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
720316 2008-11-15 01:15:00 Hello

Just want to ask if any one know of a free hash calculator to check if two folders or even drives are identical?

Came across FileCheckMD5, but havnt quite found how exactly I could use it to compare folders integrity .

Many thanks in advance :)
CCF (6760)
720317 2008-11-15 01:53:00 www.beeblebrox.org

Edit - Just realised it doesn't do folders.
sal (67)
720318 2008-11-15 02:12:00 Usually you can't actually hash a directory at all (note this is a small lie to avoid excessive technical detail, and from your perspective as a user would seem to be true), as it's a filesystem meta-structure. The normal technique to do what you are asking would be to recursively hash every file in the directory, and then compare the hashes and the directory structure.

Something like rsync should be able to do a pretty good job of telling you what (if anything) has changed.
Erayd (23)
720319 2008-11-15 03:49:00 Usually you can't actually hash a directory at all (note this is a small lie to avoid excessive technical detail, and from your perspective as a user would seem to be true), as it's a filesystem meta-structure. The normal technique to do what you are asking would be to recursively hash every file in the directory, and then compare the hashes and the directory structure.


Thanks for the update, never saw it that way before. Forgot that folders are filesystem meta-structure ><.

Will give that rsync a look.

More suggestions are welcome :)
CCF (6760)
720320 2008-11-16 05:48:00 A small VB/VBA script could do this. What output would you want to see? Also, would you want to run this as a stand-alone application or via something like Excel? andrew93 (249)
720321 2008-11-16 21:57:00 Not sure from your post what the exact requirements are, but if you wanted to see how the folders differed, you could also use something like Winmerge (http://winmerge.org/). dyewitness (9398)
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