[Feature suggestion] Directory synchronizer and file dates

[bago]

How often do you compare files between different sources and networked filesystems?

How often file dates are different only because of seconds missing or by a "costant" number of hours?

This happen very often to me and I almost every time I need to disable the date check: but I then need to do a full content compare and it is a lot time consuming (sometime I don't have the content: e.g: I'm comparing with a temp panel that loaded a windir from a non connectable machine ).

What about adding 2 flags to the "date" comparison?
1) ignore seconds
2) ignore 1 hour or exact multiplier of difference between dates (this is the simpler one, but it would be cool to have a dropdown with the expected difference "-6 hour" for example)

[Geoffrey]

Do you mean it's ALREADY possible to ignore date in directory comparisons ?

In my job, I often need to compare logs of tests to reference logs, and I use the 'compare by content' function, but it's indeed quite time consuming and not so handy

Geoffrey

[bago]

Do you mean it's ALREADY possible to ignore date in directory comparisons ?

Currently there are 2 different commands:

- Compare Directories Shift+F2
- Synchronize Dirs...

The second allow you to choose to compare dates or not and to compare by content or not.

I would like to have more power in the "Synchronize Dirs..." command.

[Valentino]

2bago
TC is already able to ignore 1 hour differences: just put 1hourdif=1 line into [Configuration] section of wincmd.ini. If the diff is bigger you can (as a workaround, until TC will make it easier) use Hacker's redate tool to shift date of all your local files by some value, then use Synch Dir, and then shift dates back with redate.

[Geoffrey]

2 bago

Thanks for the precision, and sorry I misunderstood you

Geoffrey

[Hacker]

No, don't use my ReDate tool, that's for different purposes. If you decide to go this way use my AddTime tool instead, that can do what Valentino said. ( http://thehacker.host.sk/addtime/ )

HTH
Roman

[kswenson]

I need this same thing. I keep a set of directories synchronized across 4 machines, each with different versions of windows. Previous experience (an earlier job) I found that dates on different file systems can vary by as much as 2 seconds. Also, different file systems behave differently when switching to "daylight time" (summer time).

The ignore differences of 1 hour is clearly useful, and I will try this out.

It is not clear from your answer whether this solves my files that differ by a few seconds. Ignoring seconds does not do it, because an error of 2 seconds can cause the minutes and even the hours and days to be different. I still need some way to say: "if the timestamps are withing a few seconds of each other, consider them the same time."

Any way to do this?

[kswenson]

oh yes, one more thing: zipping and unzipping can also cause differences of a few seconds.

In general I don't care -- if the files were saved in the same minute they are the same version for my purposes.