Introduction

Use this md5sum recipe to confirm the that two directories are exactly the same.

If you are on Mac OS X though ensure you use brew to instal md5sum first.

Usage

Verify directory copy by md5 summing each file and then creating a single md5sum from the list.

find -s "source directory" -type f | xargs -I{} md5sum {} > source.md5.txt
find -s "target directory" -type f | xargs -I{} md5sum {} > target.md5.txt
diff source.md5.txt target.md5.txt

This below from cnet does not work. It returned the error "find: md5sum: No such file or directory" when I ran it against my Apple Photos directory. It looks like it should work. And the answer is md5 sum does not exist by default on Mac OS X.

find -s "source directory" -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | md5sum > source.md5.txt
find -s "target directory" -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | md5sum > target.md5.txt
diff source.md5.txt target.md5.txt

Note this script can be improved to detect failed directory listing.

References

md5 entire folder - http://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-manually-verify-copied-files-in-os-x/