compare a certain number of lines between columns of two files

Question

I have a thousand files and I need to verify if they all have exactly the same information in the second column up to a certain number of lines. Below an example. I would like to print the names of the files if the first 5 lines of the second columns of the files file1.txt and file2.txt were not equal. In this case the result should show: "difference between files file1.txt and file2.txt"

file1.txt

jose     50
maria    50
fernando 50
andres   50
martin   30
pablo    30
.
.
.

file2.txt

julia    50
julio    50
alan     50
ruth     50
ana      40
manuel   40
.
.
.                    

Answer 1

Hmm. I think I would do a for loop through the files and compare then with comm.

/tmp ❯ comm -3 <(cat file1.txt|awk '{print $2}') <(cat file2.txt|awk '{print $2}')                                    ⏎
30
30
    40
    40

Note the 30's and 40's are output from the files. Some basic usage of comm: comm -1 -3 <(sort -u FILE1.txt) <(sort -u FILE2.txt)

• -1 suppress lines unique to FILE1
• -2 suppress lines unique to FILE2
• -3 suppress lines that appear in both files

So to put all this together something like:

cd /path/to/files && find . -type f -name "*.txt" | while read filename
do
   echo "*** Checking $filename ***"; comm -3 <(cat reference.txt|awk '{print $2}') <(cat $filename|awk '{print $2}'); echo "";
done