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What do you use to compute the diff? Just the diff command itself on individual files?

diff -R

You can use numerous tools to compare/manage branches; md5sum / shasum (md5 is usually useful, though not entirely safe), diff and kin, vimdiff, rsync, fdupes, jdupes, git, hg.

I went the „git” way once and I found it really cool! With all the goodies you get for free from git, like applying patches, checking differences, resetting to previous state etc.

Same, but with mercurial.

Could use something like rsync to automatically check for a difference and copy

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