Re: [PLUG] Merging home directories

["Gavin W. Burris" <bug@sas.upenn.edu>]

This might be helpful:  http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/

On 04/21/2011 01:38 AM, JP Vossen wrote:
>> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:04:20 -0400
>> From: Gordon Dexter<gordon@texasdex.com>
>>
>> I have the unenviable task of merging 5 different home directories from
>> three different computers, spanning 5 years, and I was wondering if there
>> was any tool that might simplify things.  My eventual goal is to have one
>> unified, well organized home directory that is versioned (e.g. via
>> Git) and
>> synced between multiple computers.  The last few times I've moved or
>> upgraded I just put the previous home directory as a subfolder of the
>> newer
>> one, so on one computer I have /home/gdexter/old_gdexter/older_gdexter
>> and I
>> haven't even gotten around to doing that on my newest computer.  This is
>> compounded by bad habits such as putting things on the desktop if I don't
>> know what to do with them.
>>
>> I'd rather not lose anything, of course, but I'd also rather not go
>> through
>> each homedir item by item and manually copy or merge things.  Are there
>> tools that help you with this sort of thing?  Any suggestions to save my
>> sanity?
> 
> Ouch.
> 
> First, MAKE A BACKUP!!!
> 
> Then, go through and nuke or move anything obvious.
> 
> My next thought is to recursively md5sum all the files, then pick out
> and remove the dups, to trim it down.  (Yeah, I know md5 is old and
> broken but it's good enough for this and reasonably fast.)  That'll be
> ugly to impossible without some command line and script knowledge though.
> 
> After that, there are some GUI tools.  Meld will help compare dirs.
> Unison will probably do that too, though it is really intended for
> merging a local to a remote dir.
> 
> meld - graphical tool to diff and merge files
> unison-gtk - A file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows with GTK+
> interface
> xsel - command-line tool to access X clipboard and selection buffers
> 
> I've also used spreadsheets to do stuff like that.  You can paste file
> names into columns, and match things up.  'ls -1 | xsel -bi', flip to a
> spreadsheet and paste.
> 
> Once I have a spreadsheet, I sometimes use formulas to create commands
> (like rm or mv) then paste those into a script to run all at once.  That
> also gives me an audit of what I did, or it lets me do something similar
> when I mess up, restore the backup, fix my mistake, and try again.
> 
> Watch out for hidden "dot" files that may fly under the radar of some
> tools.
> 
> Good luck,
> JP
> ----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
> My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
> ----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
> "Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
> software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
> implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
> ___________________________________________________________________________
> Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
> Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
> General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> 

-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Systems Programmer
Information Security and Unix Systems
School of Arts and Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug