How to detect drift with the state file unchanged?

Terraform
1

I am using the Terraform community version and the remote state (S3)

I face a challenge of detecting the drift in the AWS real-world infrastructure since the last apply, and it’s requested to run repeatedly with the same output so the I guess the state file shall sit unchanged for the next use.

Please note that it’s NOT the gap between my Terraform configuration files and real-world infrastructure, and there are other teams modifying the Terraform configuration files quite often,

I have not figured out any Terraform out-of-box function for it. The “refresh” CLI is close but it reconciles the state file, also “refresh” can’t dump to a new file when using remote state according to doc (https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/refresh.html)

Here is my thought about how to make it, while looks not good enough because the state file is changed by “refresh”

  1. issue “terraform state pull” to save the current remote state file to local, and name it old.state
  2. issue “terraform refresh” to reconcile the state file with the latest real-world state
  3. issue “terraform state pull” to save the new remote state file to local, and name it new.state
  4. run Linux diff to compare old.state and new.state
  5. issue “terraform state push -force” to reverse the remote state to the state in line with old.state if there is drift detected because the old.state has a lower “serial” value than the new.state

Any advice on how to make it?