Using unix 'diff' command to publish iweb to non .mac server

Question

It is a common problem that you can't upload incremental changes to a website a web server that is not a .mac. Recently I found that the unix (shell) 'diff -qr' works nicely for this.
However I can't seem to get this to work in automator. That is where I need some help.
What I did :
I have an iweb website in my directory
Documents/website
I made a second directory where I store my uploaded version of the website:
Documents/websiteonserver
Using a shell script I want to compare the differences between these two directories using the diff command in a shell script. When I run 'diff -qr websiteonserver website' in a terminal window, it gives a nice overview of which files are changed and which ones are new. When workin with iWeb this saves me a lot of time uploading my homepage to a non .mac server. I can only upload the changed files, which is usually only a few. Diff does not look at timestamps (which are useless in the iweb case) but it actually looks into a file and with the -q option it stops when it finds a difference. With the -r added (-qr) it also looks through all subdirectories and compares files with the same name.
I like to automate this process so that my wife can update our family homepage with just one mouseclick (or as few as possible)
Unfortunately the diff command in automator gives an error, and there's no info on why it does this.
The commands I gave:
cd Documents
diff -qr websiteonserver website
(using PWD i verified that the path is correct like this). The only stumbling block for automator seems to be the diff command. Anybody any suggestions on this?
The next challenge is to take the diff output and use that to upload only changed/new files to a ftp server.
Any help / ideas are welcome
Greetings,
Adriaan

Answer 1

Dear Cyclosaurus,
I used a single command as us specified. It really helped to add the path to the directories I wanted to compare. So now at least I got it two work partly:
It seems to work only if I compare two files. Comparing directories still does not work. Maybe diff generates some kind of error code when doing this??? It does not do that in the shell.
If I compare all files in directories + subdirectories , the workflow does not work. It seems as if it only accepts a single output line or so from the diff function. If there is more output (or maybe some newline character) the workflow halts. Very peculiar.
mmm.... I will try to make a shell script which I can run in automator. In the script file I will then generate a txt file. Then the automator can run the script and then it can open the resulting file in a text editor. See if that works.
mmm nope. I made a script like this:
#!/bin/bash
diff -qr ~/Documents/websiteon_theserver/ ~/Documents/website/ > ~/Documents/logfile.txt
I modified the atributes to executable and I could run it from the command line. The logfile.txt was created and has the correct info. I could not run it from automator...
I did copy the last line from the script into automator. And also there it does create the logfile, but the automator still says there was an error and stops.
maybe I should try Applescript, were it not that I am totally clueless on that language...