On my Solaris machine, I sometimes use the sum command to verify that a file has not changed. I now want to check whether a directory's contents have changed but sum only runs on files.
Is there a way to run sum or a similar command on an entire directory?
Example sum on a file:
$ sum file.xml 27247 11 file.xml 1) do a reference:
find . -type f -exec sum {} \; | sort -k3 > /my/reference.txt 2) do a run time check
find . -type f -exec sum {} \; | sort -k3 | diff /my/reference.txt - where
sort -k3 do a sorting on file namediff part will show file changed, added or deleted.
diff gives you richer information of the changes, if you want to have a single sum as a result/reference, you can obviously pipe on the results of the sort commands to sum instead of saving them to a file. Use tar to create tarball of directory and run sum on it then.
tar cf - <directory name> | sum -
sum instead of md5sum help? sum file.xml once again tar will also include ownership, permissions and timestamps, so unless you care about those (normally you wouldn't) this is a bad idea. On Solaris tar works differently. So either use gtar from GNU or use tar cf - and then the solution from Miline:
tar cf - folder | sum 
tar c dir | md5sum