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

Question

I want to compare file1 with file2 and generate a file3 which contains the lines in file1 which are not present in file2

User · Answer

Sometimes diff is the utility you need  but sometimes join is more appropriate  The files need to be pre-sorted or  if you are using a shell which supports process substitution such as bash  ksh or zsh  you can do the sort on the fly   join -v 1  lt  sort file1   lt  sort file2

User · Answer

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  gt  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  lt  sort file1   lt  sort file2   gt  file3   provided that your shell supports process substitution  bash does

User · Answer

If you have a CSV file with single or even multiple columns  you can do these line by line  quot diff quot  operations using the sqlite3 embedded db  It comes with python  so should be available on most linux macs  You can script the sqlite3 commands on the bash shell without needing to write python   Create your a csv and b csv files Ensure sqlite3 is installed using the command  quot sqlite3 -help quot  Run the below commands directly on the Linux Mac shell  or put it in a script    echo  quot   mode csv  import a csv atable  import b csv btable create table result as select   from atable EXCEPT select   from btable   output result csv select   from result    quit  quot    sqlite3 temp db   Note   Ensure there is a newline for each of the sqlite3 commands  How it works  Import the 2 csvs into   quot atable quot  and  quot btable quot  respectively  Use the  quot except quot  sql operator to select the data available in  quot atable quot  but missing in  quot btable quot   Create a  quot result quot  table using the select query statement Output the result table to result csv by running  quot select   from result  quot   If you need to operate on specific columns  sqlite3 or any db is the way to go  I have tried diff ing on multiple GB files using the builtin diff and comm tools  Sqlite  beats linux utilities by a mile

User · Answer

Try   sdiff file1 file2   It ususally works much better in most cases for me  You may want to sort files prior  if order of lines is not important  e g  some text config files    For example   sdiff -w 185 file1 cfg file2 cfg

User · Answer

Use the Diff utility and extract only the lines starting with  lt  in the output

User · Answer

Many answers already  but none of them perfect IMHO  Thanatos  answer leaves some extra characters per line and Sorpigal s answer requires the files to be sorted or pre-sorted  which may not be adequate in all circumstances    I think the best way of getting the lines that are different and nothing else  no extra chars  no re-ordering  is a combination of diff  grep  and awk  or similar     If the lines do not contain any   lt    a short one-liner can be    diff urls txt    grep   lt     sed  s  lt    g    but that will remove every instance of   lt     less than  space  from the lines  which is not always OK  e g  source code   The safest option is to use awk    diff urls txt    grep   lt     awk   for  i 2  i lt NF  i    printf  i      print  NF     This one-liner diffs both files  then filters out the ed-style output of diff  then removes the trailing   lt   that diff adds  This works even if the lines contains some   lt   themselves

User · Answer

I m surprised nobody mentioned diff -y to produce a side-by-side output  for example   diff -y file1 file2  gt  file3   And in file3 different lines have a symbol   in middle    same     same diff 1   diff 2

User · Answer

Consider this  file a txt   abcd efgh   file b txt     abcd   You can find the difference with   diff -a --suppress-common-lines -y a txt b txt   The output will be   efgh    You can redirict the output in an output file  c txt  using   diff -a --suppress-common-lines -y a txt b txt  gt  c txt   This will answer your question           which contains the lines in file1 which are   not present in file2

User · Answer

The Unix utility diff is meant for exactly this purpose     diff -u file1 file2  gt  file3   See the manual and the Internet for options  different output formats  etc

User · Answer

If you need to solve this with coreutils the accepted answer is good   comm -23  lt  sort file1   lt  sort file2   gt  file3   You can also use sd  stream diff   which doesn t require sorting nor process substitution and supports infinite streams  like so   cat file1   sd  cat file2   gt  file3   Probably not that much of a benefit on this example  but still consider it  in some cases you won t be able to use comm nor grep -F nor diff   Here s a blogpost I wrote about diffing streams on the terminal  which introduces sd

User · Answer

Yet  no grep solution    lines which are exist only in file2   grep -Fxvf file1 file2  gt  file3  lines which are exist only in file1   grep -Fxvf file2 file1  gt  file3  lines which are exist in both files   grep -Fxf file1 file2  gt  file3

User · Answer

diff a1 txt a2 txt   grep   gt      sed  s  gt       gt  a3 txt   I tried almost all the answers in this thread  but none was complete  After few trails above one worked for me  diff will give you difference but with some unwanted special charas  where you actual difference lines starts with       so next step is to grep lines starts with     and followed by removing the same with sed

User · Answer

You could use diff with following output formatting   diff --old-line-format    --unchanged-line-format    file1 file2   --old-line-format      disable output for file1 if line was differ compare in file2  --unchanged-line-format     disable output if lines were same

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

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