Reputation: 2803

How to get the difference (only additions) between two files in linux

I have two files A1 and A2 (unsorted). A1 is previous version of A2 and some lines have been added to A2. How can I get the new lines that are added to A2?

Note: I just want the new lines added and dont want the lines which were in A1 but deleted in A2. When i do diff A1 A2, I get the additions as well as deletions but I want only additions.

Please suggest a way to do this.

Upvotes: 122

Answers (8)

Alfonso Baqueiro Bernal

Reputation: 11

You can filter only the lines that need to be added to fileA to become equal to fileB. We include the first line that indicates the line number to apply the change.

diff $fileA $fileB | grep '^>' -B 1

Upvotes: 1

scottkosty

Reputation: 2600

Most of the below is copied directly from @TomOnTime's serverfault answer here. At the bottom is an attempt that works on unsorted files, but the command sorts the files before giving the diff so in many cases it will not be what is desired. For well-formatted diffs of unsorted files, you might find the other answers more useful (thanks to @Fritz for pointing this out):

Show lines that only exist in file a: (i.e. what was deleted from a)

comm -23 a b

Show lines that only exist in file b: (i.e. what was added to b)

comm -13 a b

Show lines that only exist in one file or the other: (but not both)

comm -3 a b | sed 's/^\t//'

(Warning: If file a has lines that start with TAB, it (the first TAB) will be removed from the output.)

NOTE: Both files need to be sorted for "comm" to work properly. If they aren't already sorted, you should sort them:

sort <a >a.sorted
sort <b >b.sorted
comm -12 a.sorted b.sorted

If the files are extremely long, this may be quite a burden as it requires an extra copy and therefore twice as much disk space.

Edit: note that the command can be written more concisely using process substitution (thanks to @phk for the comment):

comm -12 <(sort < a) <(sort < b)

Upvotes: 132

Francesc Rosas

Reputation: 6055

A similar approach to https://stackoverflow.com/a/15385080/337172 but hopefully more understandable and easy to tweak:

diff \
  --new-line-format="%L" \
  --old-line-format="" \
  --unchanged-line-format="" \
  A1 A2

Upvotes: 15

Mihai8

Reputation: 3147

The simple method is to use :

sdiff A1 A2

Another method is to use comm, as you can see in Comparing two unsorted lists in linux, listing the unique in the second file

Upvotes: 7

Premjith

Reputation: 1198

You can try this

diff --changed-group-format='%>' --unchanged-group-format='' A1 A2

The options are documented in man diff:

       --GTYPE-group-format=GFMT
              format GTYPE input groups with GFMT

and:

       LTYPE is 'old', 'new', or 'unchanged'.
              GTYPE is LTYPE or 'changed'.

and:

              GFMT (only) may contain:

       %<     lines from FILE1

       %>     lines from FILE2

       [...]

Upvotes: 77

user1046885

Reputation: 171

git diff path/file.css | grep -E "^\+" | grep -v '+++ b/' | cut -c 2-

grep -E "^\+" is from previous accepted answer, it is incomplete because leaves non-source stuff
grep -v '+++ b' removes non-source line with file name of later version
cut -c 2- removes column of + signs, also may use sed 's/^\+//'

comm or sdiff were not an option because of git.

Upvotes: 8