[parkerhoyes]

I created a CLI tool which is kind of like tar, except it only saves the attributes and (optionally) hashes of files, and it uses a text-based one attribute per line format. You can finely configure exactly which attributes to save (eg. just execute permissions, or just modified time, etc.) and it can write the attributes back to the filesystem.

It's useful for various sysadmin-related tasks, like checksumming an entire directory tree, finding the file(s) that are different between two directory trees, or tracking file attributes in git. Since it's text-based, it's really easy to process using sed/grep (the file format is specifically designed to be regex-friendly).

GitHub: https://github.com/parkerhoyes/stat-archiver