How are modified files detected?

[DJX]

I am upgrading a somewhat heavily modified JIRA 3.13 instance. I would like to bring as much of the system back to the original state before upgrading. Can anyone help me figure out how the "Modified Files" under "System Info" are determined? Is there an original copy somewhere I could use to see what the changes are?

[Sultan Maiyaki · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Once you can determine those fles that were modified, you can use tools like http://www.diffnow.com/ to look at the modifications done by comparing the present copy against the downloaded version

[Timothy]

Atlassian allows you to download previous versions here.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download-archives

[Nico Rusam]

This thread is a bit old, but I don't think the accepted answer is good enough. Because if it isn't your Confluence/Jira/... I don't think that the customer would be very happy if he knows that someone uploaded the configuration files to a website...

So here is my solution on Linux.

Download the original Version (link provided by Timothy) and extract it. Then use this folder as one of the two dir paths (DIR_ONE). Replace DIR_TWO with your installation folder path.

-x will ignore the specified directories (temp and logs) because there are of course changes, but they shouldn't matter. But you can remove/change them or add more if you want to.

diff -qr -x "temp" -x "logs" --ignore-all-space DIR_ONE DIR_TWO

The output is like:

> diff -qr -x "temp" -x "logs" --ignore-all-space dir1 dir2
Files dir1/file2 and dir2/file2 differ
Only in dir2: file3

With this list you know which files differ and then can compare only those files.