Comparing Two Files in Linux Terminal

Comparing two files in linux terminal

Here is my solution for this :

mkdir temp
mkdir results
cp /usr/share/dict/american-english ~/temp/american-english-dictionary
cp /usr/share/dict/british-english ~/temp/british-english-dictionary
cat ~/temp/american-english-dictionary | wc -l > ~/results/count-american-english-dictionary
cat ~/temp/british-english-dictionary | wc -l > ~/results/count-british-english-dictionary
grep -Fxf ~/temp/american-english-dictionary ~/temp/british-english-dictionary > ~/results/common-english
grep -Fxvf ~/results/common-english ~/temp/american-english-dictionary > ~/results/unique-american-english
grep -Fxvf ~/results/common-english ~/temp/british-english-dictionary > ~/results/unique-british-english

How to compare 2 files line by line with terminal

What you are after is an awk script of the following form:

$ awk '(NR==FNR){a[FNR]=$0;next}
       !(FNR in a) { print "file2 has more lines than file1"; exit 1 }
       { print (($0 == a[FNR]) ? "matching" : "not matching") }
       END { if (NR-FNR > FNR) print "file1 has more lines than file2"; exit 1}' file1 file2

How to compare two huge text file in linux and get the difference

Just Run the command to get difference of two files (file X and file Y).

diff -U 0 x y

Or if you want to store difference to other file (z) then run the command

diff -U 0 x y >> z

Comparing Two Files For Matching Words in Linux

You want to use the dwdiff utility :).

Example usage:

dwdiff "File A.txt" "File B.txt"

It might take a little while to get used to it's output, but check http://linux.die.net/man/1/dwdiff for more details on that.

There are also several visual diff applications out there, but I prefer using it on the command line.

Compare two files line by line and generate the difference in another file

diff(1) is not the answer, but comm(1) is.

NAME
       comm - compare two sorted files line by line

SYNOPSIS
       comm [OPTION]... FILE1 FILE2

...

       -1     suppress lines unique to FILE1

       -2     suppress lines unique to FILE2

       -3     suppress lines that appear in both files

So

comm -2 -3 file1 file2 > file3

The input files must be sorted. If they are not, sort them first. This can be done with a temporary file, or...

comm -2 -3 <(sort file1) <(sort file2) > file3

provided that your shell supports process substitution (bash does).

Compare Two Files and Print Lines That Don't Match

You can get the expected output with grep:

grep -vf file2 file1

Not able to compare two files with comm / diff

its strange that VI :set list didnt show the difference.

You'll notice the difference in vi if you immediately after loading the CR+NL file look at the status line, there's [dos] displayed next to the file name.

If you just want to compare the files, you can use grep with the -Z (ignore white space at line end) option.

If you want to remove the CRs from the DOS file, you can use tr -d \\r <withCR >withoutCR.

Fastest way to tell if two files have the same contents in Unix/Linux?

I believe cmp will stop at the first byte difference:

cmp --silent $old $new || echo "files are different"

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