Here thoroughly means “list all differ files, find those files with same name and different content, list the difference of content”.
Before I got a lazy solution, git init one directory and copy another directory into it. Then using git diff to view the difference.
But I wonder there is another more smart way to do this? Thus I raised this question.
diff -Naur dir1/ dir2/
Pretty useful for submitting software patches, incidentally: diff -Naur orig/ patched/ > my_changes.diff
����*�����;3[�� when using this command? The compared files containing utf-8 code.
diff -Naur -U8 dir1/ dir2/. (That may or may not fix the problem; it could have to do with the codepages in your kernel, how your terminal is set up, the underlying filesystem, etc.)
To complement on the response of @Bandrami, because I had the same problem @Zen did: before diffing the directories, make sure you cleaned all binaries and code unrelated files from dir2/, then compare the two directories. For instance:
$ cd dir2
$ make clean
$ cd ..
$ diff -Naur dir1/ dir2/
git initor copy directories, you can use (at least with the current version of Git)git diff --no-index.