lsch: list all added, deleted, and modified files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

Another little command line tool for Linux to track modifications within a directory tree.

Invocation

▶ lsch --help
Usage: lsch [CMD] [OPTIONS]...

List all added, deleted, and modified files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

Without CMD argument the tool shows all changes made since the last reset.
  Options:
    -0   use ASCII null as output separator

The CMD argument, if given, must be one of the following:
  init            create empty change tracking database in the current directory
                  Options:
                    -f,--force   discard any previous tracking data
  reset           accept current state as the reference for further change tracking
  help,-h,--help  display this help and exit

Modified items are displayed one per line, each prefixed with a status symbol and a space. The status symbol is '+' for added files, '-' for deleted files, and '*' for modified files. Only regular files and symbolic links are tracked. The current directory and all its sub-directories must not be modified while the scan is in progress.

The tool is not meant to replace version control systems like svn or git, instead it provides much simpler functionality, basically limited to detecting changed files only. It does not store any diff information, nor it maintains any history beyond the state of the directory tree at the last reset. The same time the tool is useful in scenarios where only the names of the changed (deleted, modified) files are important, for example, when creating an incremental backup.

Technical details

The tool operates on the current directory only. The lsch init command initialises the directory for tracking by creating .lsch.db file. The file contains the state of the directory and its sub-directories, and is updated on each lsch reset.

Internally, the tool relies on sha256sum utility for calculating checksums of files. Those checksums are used for change detection.

Symbolic links are not followed, only their target pathnames get compared.

System requirements

Lua version 5.3, plus the following (well-known) Linux utilities:

• sha256sum
• find
• gzip
• readlink
• xargs

So far the tool has been tested on Linux Mint from version 20.3 and above, but it is likely to work on other (at least Debian-based) Linux distributions.

Installation

None as such, just run make, and then copy the file lsch over to a directory listed in your PATH environment variable.