diff two files

noir911 · 03-23-2009, 10:18 PM

I have one file with

Quote:

test
test
test
test
test
NOTtest

another file with

Quote:

test

Is there any way to tell diff to ignore "test" since it appears in both the files and only show "NOTtest" as the diff result since it's not on the other file?

SonJelfn · 03-24-2009, 03:22 AM

diff is meant to be used to find all the differences between two files so in your particular case, the differences are pretty big and can't be ignored using only the diff command.

I'm not quite sure what you exactly wish to accomplish, but maybe you could use the grep command to filter out the words you don't want, creating new files which then you can diff so you can obtain the result you want.

I hope that helps.

Good luck.

chrism01 · 03-25-2009, 06:30 AM

Looking at the man page, I'd say the -I or '--ignore-matching-lines' options look promising.. maybe --suppress-common-lines

rweaver · 03-25-2009, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by noir911

I have one file with

another file with

Is there any way to tell diff to ignore "test" since it appears in both the files and only show "NOTtest" as the diff result since it's not on the other file?

As far as I know, diff will not do this procedure.

grep -v will remove lines... you could do something like:

for i in `cat file2`; do cat file1 | grep -v $i; done

which will result in the correct results, but i suspect only because your example is overly simplified. You could also do this fairly easily in perl in a much more robust way.

heck, even grep -v `cat file2` file1 should return the results you want for that particular example.