It's like this

rsync -nr remote_server:/home/bkesavan/test/ Local_server_dir_path

I've tried it using rsync and it's working fine for me.

I used rsync -nr :/home/bkesavan/test/

Thank you.

The first half of your command is trying to execute a directory via SSH, which doesn't make any sense. That's what the error message is showing. My script used SCP to move files locally and do a local diff. An improvement is to use a stream (as Amit suggested above), though that only allows for one remote file (not two). A directory can't be streamed like that, however, you'll need to walk the directory and do file-by-file comparisons unless you pull the whole directory to the local machine and do a local recursive diff.

So the short answer is "no, not really".

Thanks for sharing this useful information.

I'm trying to do a diff between remote servers for directories.

ssh  "/home/bkesavan" | diff -S /home/bkesavan/

I've tried multipe variables there (S,s,p,q,r) etc, but I can only see the below response
bash: /home/bkesavan: is a directory

Is it achievable through diff?

if a file exists only in local dire, what will say this script

Thanks

cd {local-dir}

for i in `find {subdir} -type f ` ; do echo "=== $i ===" ; ssh {remote-user}@{remote-host} "cat {remote-dir}/$i" | diff – {local-dir}/$i ; done

Example:

cd ~/root-of-my-local-project-dir

for i in `find app/controllers/ -type f ` ; do echo "=== $i ===" ; ssh bob@foo.remote-server.com "cat root-of-remote-project-dir/$i" | diff – ~/root-of-my-local-project-dir/$i ; done

Note: {subdir} can be "." if you want everything from {local-dir}

http://larryn.blogspot.com/2009/01/remote-diff.html

That is definitely a better solution. In my defense, when I posted this (3.5 years ago) I didn't "get" that `ssh` could be anything more than a secure remote interactive shell. I've since learned better. : )