NTFSCMP

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: April 2006
Page Index

NAME

ntfscmp - compare two NTFS filesystems and tell the differences

SYNOPSIS

ntfscmp [OPTIONS] DEVICE1 DEVICE2

DESCRIPTION

The ntfscmp program makes a comparison between two NTFS filesystems from all aspects and reports all variances it finds. The filesystems can be on block devices or images files. Ntfscmp can be used for volume verification however its primary purpose was 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 then it could be useful to compare the metadata images created by using the --metadata option of ntfsclone(8) to eliminate the usually uninteresting timestamp changes.

The terse output of ntfscmp is intentional because the provided information is enough in each case to determine the exact differences. This can be achieved, for instance, if one compares the verbose outputs of ntfsinfo(8) for each reported inodes by the diff(1) utility.

OPTIONS

Below is a summary of the options that ntfscmp accepts.

-P, --no-progress-bar: Don't show progress bars.
-v, --verbose: More informational output.
-h, --help: Display help and exit.

EXIT CODES

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

KNOWN ISSUES

No problem is known. If you would find otherwise then please send your report to the development team: ntfs-3g-devel@lists.sf.net

AUTHOR

ntfscmp was written by Szabolcs Szakacsits. It was ported to ntfs-3g by Erik Larsson.

AVAILABILITY

ntfscmp is part of the ntfs-3g package and is available from:
http://www.tuxera.com/community/