# Diff of current install with default install



## bjeurissen (Jul 7, 2016)

Hi all,

I have just finished fine-tuning a FreeBSD server and would like to document its configuration.

Maybe this is a bit of a naive question, but I was wondering if there is an easy way to do a `diff` between e.g. the config files installed by default (clean install + updates) in /etc and my local edits (additional config files, changed config files,...)?

Cheers,
Ben


----------



## kpa (Jul 7, 2016)

You'll need the system sources installed at /usr/src (see Thread 29172, applies to later versions as well) for this to work but mergemaster(8) will show you all of the changed files, your local edits etc and will offer to merge your modified versions with the new versions of the files. On a system where everything is up to date you can do this to make it ignore the version control tags and show the differences regardless:

`# mergemaster -s`

Select [Leave it for later] on every prompt to discard any changes.

Note that this does not cover every single configuration file, only those that are under mergemaster(8) control.


----------

