Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have two files:
File1 has the below contents:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10
File2 has the below contents:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
How can I find the difference between two files and print the odd number out and also to say from which file it is.
For example, in this case 9 only appears in File2, so how can I run a command and get output along the lines of
9 is only in File2
If you have clean formatting (space x newline), the easiest is to transform the line to the rows and just diff them, like this:
diff <( sed -e "s/ /\n/g" h.txt ) v.txt
Where h.txt is horizontal file and v.txt is vertical file
<( cat v.txt ) is a UUOC. Just use v.txt as the final argument.
Nov 6, 2015 at 14:34
You may want to use (G)AWK:
To find differences use AWK to convert file1.txt to line by line representation first, then pipe the result into diff:
gawk 'BEGIN {FS = " "} ; {for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) print $i}' file1.txt | diff file2.txt -
There's more than one way to do it; here's comm.
First printf a header to interpret comm's output -- giving the requested filenames -- then run comm on the sorted input, suppressing lines that exist in both files (-3). The two inputs to comm are process substitutions where I use don_crissti's tr suggestion to convert spaces in File1 to newlines; then pass both files through sort, which comm requires.
printf "File1\tFile2\n"; comm -3 <(tr ' ' '\n' < File1 | sort) <(sort File2)
Input File1:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 11
Input File2:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Output:
$ printf "File1\tFile2\n"; comm -3 <(sed 's/ /\n/g' File1 |sort ) <(sort File2)
File1 File2
11
9
