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Compare Files with Comm

September 6, 2020

Here’s a command that will compare two files and display the only entries in the first file that are missing in the second file. To do this, there’s a compare command in Linux Bash called comm that comes with several options. The option we are interested in is the comm -23 which exactly does that. Let me demonstrate.

Let’s say file a.txt contains:

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten

And file b.txt contains:

one
three
four
five
nine

one three four five nine

We then run comm command using the option -23.

comm -23 a.txt b.txt > c.txt

comm -23 a.txt b.txt > c.txt

The contents of c.txt is:

two
six
seven
eight
ten

two six seven eight ten

Filed Under: Linux Tagged With: -23, comm, compare

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