I am working on a shell script for some one here at the office who appears to be more anal about his input syntax than most command line programs. towards the end I use sdiff to create a side by side comparison of the changes to a single column text file. he doesn't like that it uses a pipe symbol to denote when a line was added and a line was deleted at the same location in the file. he wants them to be separated into an add line and a delete line. I've read through the sdiff man page 4 or 5 times now and I don't see any way to do it, can anyone provide any insight?

Nope - that's what sdiff does, and really, that's what its
name and description suggest it does. To achieve the
behaviour *HE* wants you'd have to pipe this through
maybe sed or awk and work the magic yourself.



Cheers,
Tink