2

I have file1 and file2.

file1:

a james
b mike
d john

file2:

a 10 20 30 40
b 11 12 13 14
c 20 30 40 50
d 10 20 30 50

I want the output file to only find the difference in column 1, and print that line for file2. In this case: C. so file3 look like:

c 20 30 40 50

I think the proper command is comm, but I don't think I'm using the right switches because every combination I can think of isn't giving me the right results.

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  • So since you are mentioning comm, we can assume the first column is sorted? Great! As a first step: in a shell like bash that has process substitution we can do: comm <(cut -d ' ' -f 1 file1 ) <(cut -d ' ' -f 1 file2) – phk Jul 3 '16 at 20:58
  • yep, the first column will always be sorted. I mentioned comm, but the list of commands that I can use are: comm, sdiff, diff, join, cmp. Using your command, that doesn't seem to print out cleanly. Instead it just has my file2 contents split up across the file – nico Jul 3 '16 at 21:03
  • Huh? It should be a comparison of the first column, between file1 and file2, you should see what is missing in file2 on the left side, like I said, it would only be a first step. Oh and BTW, if you add -13 to the comm call from me you will only see the differing entries in the first column, so you can then use this to select from file2: grep "^$(comm -13 <(cut -d ' ' -f 1 file1 ) <(cut -d ' ' -f 1 file2))" file2 – phk Jul 3 '16 at 21:30
2

you can do this with awk

awk 'FNR==NR{a[$1];next};!($1 in a)' file1 file2
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  • I am really interested in how this works. I don't have much experience with multi-file awk and most tutorials aren't about it either. – phk Jul 3 '16 at 21:00
  • awk seems to be the way to go here, but I have only been given comm, sdiff, diff, join, cmp as commands to use. – nico Jul 3 '16 at 21:04
0

I figured it out!

join –v 1 file2 file1
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