As I tweak the Little Purple Books theme I'm using here, at Someday Box, and at Permission Granted, they don't stay in sync. I need to address that before I roll it out to half a dozen more sites, but for now, I'm copying the changes from here to there to there.

Us geeks have all kinds of tools for doing this, that, and the other thing, but the best tools for me are access to the command line and knowledge of the commands. I've forgotten quite a bit, but long ago I was amazing with DOS, and could get by on a UNIX box.

Today I wanted to verify that this version of the theme matched the latest version at Someday Box. I downloaded both folders, then looked for a compare tool that worked on my old Mac.

Well, of course, the answer is using Terminal, Mac's access to the UNIX command line. This command, in fact:

diff -rq folder1 folder2

Uses the difference command recursively in quick mode to compare the files. Leave off the q and you'll see the differences in each file.

Quick and simple. I love me some command line. Not as much as homemade salsa or hearing Garth Brooks sing Bob Dylan songs, but a lot.