Simulate SVN diff using plain diff

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

svn diff does not work very well with 2 local folders, so I am trying to do this diff using diff locally.

since there's a bunch of meta files in an svn directory, I want to do a diff that excludes everything EXCEPT *.java files. there seems to be only an --exclude option, so I'm not sure how to do this.

perhaps, we can use find and execute diff on each .java
or
we can do a grep after we get our result (filter to only .java diffs), but that'd be tricky.

this is what I have so far.
diff -r --exclude=.svn dir1/ dir2/ > diffs.txt

there are simply too many types of files to filter using only the --exclude option.

anyone have thoughts?

2

how about:

       --exclude-from=file
              When  comparing  directories, ignore files and subdirectories whose
              basenames match any pattern contained in file.
3

Well, as I've said, there are simply too many files in there to try to exclude everything.

Unless, you are suggesting there is a way using an exclude file to instead INCLUDE only certain files?

4

Any help on this? All I want is a way to use diff with --include instead of --exclude...