Following scenario: Two servers, one Linux, one windows, and some months ago someone copied from windows to Linux a code base. As things happen, the windows server was still in use so changes were made and supposed to be ported to the Linux server as well. And again, as it happens, that did, well, not happen. Now under Linux you would have a few nice tools to do the job, but Windows, not so much.
So, using a windows workstation I connected to both locations and did a search in the windows explorer. Don’t worry, this insanity has a method. Since I knew the date of when the full copy was made, I could simply search for all files on the windows server that are modified after said date. Only problem now, how to get the list into something usable? I mean you can’t just copy that 6000 files list into notepad or your favorite spreadsheet.
For that there is a free little tool called SysExporter. It will allow you to copy not only the content of any list under windows, but also have it as a tab delimited list.
That saved and a second file for the Linux server in the same format (for easy comparison), now all I had to do was run a PHP script that parses both files as CSV files, using the tabulator character as delimiter and voila, you have two arrays in the same structure that you can compare. There I compared file name and the folder (after normalizing both so the beginning is the same for each). On no match, it’s written in a new file. All those entries in the new file are then my list of files I have to copy and check for needed changes. Of course it’s still the same tab delimited format so you can just import it into a spreadsheet for easier sorting and display.
As a small caveat, windows likes to also search in ZIP files. If you do not really need that, you should disable it. Just go to start, run, then enter this: regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
A small box appears telling you all went well and now you no longer search for ZIP files. You should maybe get yourself some replacement like 7zip while you are at it.
