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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T11:35:32+00:00

Is there a way to specify the maximum recursion level for recursive diff diff

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Is there a way to specify the maximum recursion level for recursive diff diff -r (to compare two directories)?

What I’m trying to do is compare two projects on github (one was branched from another). I now suspect there may be a remote branch in one of them that links to the other, which will let me do a diff from git, however the question still applies to filesystems in general.

Edit-Update: This answer addresses how I might have git help me perform a comparison: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5162839/340947

What’s been happening is I have cloned both repos and I am calling diff -r repoA repoB and it reports differences in the .git/ dirs, which is to be expected, yet I am uninterested in differences within these directories.

In this case it would be perfect to just show diffs between the first-level files in the directories, because this particular project does not have subdirs. If anyone has tips for how to compare two dirs while excluding particular folders (the .git/ dirs in my case) that’d be great too!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1. I’m not aware of any way of limiting the depth of recursion with diff -r.

    2. You can exclude files that match a pattern with -x PAT or --exclude=PAT. So

      diff -r -x .git repoA repoB

      would be useful if you did want recursion.

    3. In your case, just leave off the -r since you don’t want it to recurse.

      diff repoA repoB

      already does what you want.

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