I do testing in web development in that way, that the public website is stored in the public_html subdirectory, and the test site is located in develop_html. To see whether there are differences between those two sites, I use the following aliases:
alias changes=’dir=$(pwd|sed -e s:develop:public:); echo diff with $(echo $dir|sed -e s:$HOME:\~:); for file in $(for rcsfile in RCS/.??* RCS/*; do echo $rcsfile|cut -d, -f1; done); do echo “>>> $(basename $file):”; colordiff --no-banner $(basename $file) $dir; done’
That way only files I manage with RCS are checked, and I can do that call from any subdirectory of develop_html.