Comparing two lists [SOLVED (at least it looks like that)]

Yuri Pankov yuri.pankov at gmail.com
Sat May 7 03:11:34 UTC 2011


On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 04:23:40AM +0200, Rolf Nielsen wrote:
> 2011-05-07 02:09, Rolf Nielsen skrev:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I have two text files, quite extensive ones. They have some lines in
> > common and some lines are unique to one of the files. The lines that do
> > exist in both files are not necessarily in the same location. Now I need
> > to compare the files and output a list of lines that exist in both
> > files. Is there a simple way to do this? diff? awk? sed? cmp? Or a
> > combination of two or more of them?
> >
> > TIA,
> >
> > Rolf
> 
> sort file1 file2 | uniq -d

I very seriously doubt that this line does what you want...

$ printf "a\na\na\nb\n" > file1; printf "c\nc\nb\n" > file2; sort file1 file2 | uniq -d
a
b
c


Try this instead (probably bloated):

sort < file1 | uniq | tr -s '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 -I % grep -Fx % file2 | sort | uniq

There is comm(1), of course, but it expects files to be already sorted.


HTH,
Yuri


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