ntfscmp(1M)

Name

ntfscmp - compare two NTFS file systems and report the differences

Synopsis

ntfscmp [options] device1 device2

Description

The ntfscmp utility compares all aspects of two NTFS file systems and reports all differences it finds. The file systems can be on block devices or in image files. ntfscmp can be used for volume verification. However, its primary purpose is to be an efficient development tool, used to quickly locate, identify, and check the correctness of the metadata changes made to NTFS.

If one is interested only in the NTFS metadata changes, it can be useful to compare the metadata images created by using the –-metadata option of ntfsclone(1M) to eliminate the usually uninteresting timestamp changes.

The terse output of ntfscmp is intentional, because the provided information is sufficient to determine exact differences. More copious output can be obtained by using diff(1) to compare the verbose output of ntfsinfo(1M) for each reported inode.

Options

Supported options are listed below. Options have both single-letter and full-name forms.

–h, –-help

Display help and exit.

–P, –-no-progress-bar

Do not show progress bars.

–v, –-verbose

Display more debug, warning, and error messages.

Exit Status

The exit code is 0 on success, non-zero otherwise.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE Availability system/file-system/ntfsprogs Interface Stability Uncommitted

See also

diff(1), ntfscat(1M), ntfsclone(1M), ntfsinfo(1M), ntfsprogs(1M), parted(1M), attributes(5)

Authors

Authors

ntfscmp was written by Szabolcs Szakacsits.