Compare two files line by line and generate the di

Question

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

Answer 1

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 > 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 <(sort file1) <(sort file2) > file3

provided that your shell supports process substitution (bash does).

Answer 2

diff a1.txt a2.txt | grep '> ' | sed 's/> //' > 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.

Answer 3

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 <(sort file1) <(sort file2)