CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Camden S.
Camden S.

Reputation: 2245

Find similar text files

Does anyone have a particularly elegant command line (linux, OS X) way to identify "textually similar" files in a given directory?

By "textually similar", I mean that the files should only differ in N number of lines.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 3199

Answers (4)

Bruno Bronosky
Bruno Bronosky

Reputation: 70459

Using Terraform means having a lot of files that are copied from other files and only a few changes made. It's really frustrating to figure out where a file was copied from when you want to see what's special about it. I made a tool I call similarities.sh to help me identify how similar a file is to each file in a group of others.

#!/bin/bash

fileA="$1"
shift
for fileB in "$@"; do
    (
        # diff once grep twice with the help of tee and stderr
        diff $fileA $fileB | \
            tee >(grep -cE '^< ' >&2) | \
                  grep -cE '^> ' >&2
    # recapture stderr
    ) 2>&1 | (
        read -d '' diffA diffB;
        printf "The files %s and %s have %s:%s diffs out of %s:%s lines.\n" \
            $fileA $fileB $diffA $diffB $(wc -l < $fileA) $(wc -l < $fileB)
    )
done | column -t

Here it is in action:

$ similarities.sh terraform.tfvars ../*/terraform.tfvars
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../api_proxy/terraform.tfvars                   have  3:3   diffs  out  of  51:51  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../cf-ip-location-lookup/terraform.tfvars       have  4:12  diffs  out  of  51:59  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../cf-region-cookie-setter/terraform.tfvars     have  4:8   diffs  out  of  51:55  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../cf-switch-region-origin/terraform.tfvars     have  4:10  diffs  out  of  51:57  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../reformat_devops_alerts/terraform.tfvars      have  0:0   diffs  out  of  51:51  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../restart_location/terraform.tfvars            have  17:3  diffs  out  of  51:37  lines.
The  files  terraform.tfvars  and  ../warehouse-availability-etl/terraform.tfvars  have  3:3   diffs  out  of  51:51  lines.

Upvotes: 1

Michael
Michael

Reputation: 151

Maybe PMD is what your are looking for: https://pmd.github.io

It's maintained, and the usage is simple.

You may want the duplicated code detection: https://pmd.github.io/pmd-5.5.5/usage/cpd-usage.html (It's not clear in your question if you target code or simple plain text, but I don't see why it shouldn't work in both case).

Upvotes: 2

BMW
BMW

Reputation: 45303

Using awk

diff file1 file2 |awk '!/^<|^>|^-/{a=$0;lt[a]=0;gt[a]=0;next}    # Use label (not start from <,>,---) and set the array lt and gt
     /</{lt[a]++}                                                # if has differ "<", sum it into array lt
     />/{gt[a]++}                                                # if has differ ">", sum it into array gt
END{for (i in lt) 
       sum+=lt[i]>gt[i]?lt[i]:gt[i]                              # compare "<" or ">" lines, take the max and add in variable sum
       printf "Files have differs in %d lines\n",sum             # Do the print job.
       if (sum<3) {print "So files are similar" }
       else{print "So files are not similar"}
    }'

You can define the number by yourself, for example, in my command if there are differs in two lines "if (sum<3)", I will think these files are not similar.

Test result.

$ cat file1
a
b
a
d
b
c
c

$ cat file2
a
b
d
b
d
c
d
f

$ diff file1 file2
3d2
< a
5a5
> d
7,8c7,8
< c
<
---
> d
> f

$  diff file1 file2 |awk '!/^<|^>|^-/{a=$0;lt[a]=0;gt[a]=0;next}/</{lt[a]++}/>/{gt[a]++}END{for (i in lt) sum+=lt[i]>gt[i]?lt[i]:gt[i];printf "Files have differs in %d lines\n",sum;if (sum<3) {print "So files are similar" }else{print "So files are not similar"}}'

Files have differs in 4 lines
So files are not similar

Upvotes: 1

lreeder
lreeder

Reputation: 12224

Here's one rough approach using unified diff and wc to count the different lines. Grep is used to filter out the diff context:

diff -U 0  file1 file2  | grep -v ^@ | grep -v ^--- | grep -v ^+++ | wc -l

Upvotes: 1

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