comm

all

Select or reject lines common to two files. Both files must be sorted.

Examples (5)

Produce three tab-separated columns: lines only in first file, lines only in second file, and common lines

comm file1 file2

Print only lines common to both files

comm -12 file1 file2

Print only lines common to both files, reading one file from `stdin`

cat file1 | comm -12 - file2

Get lines only found in first file, saving the result to a third file

comm -23 file1 file2 > file1_only

Print lines only found in second file, when the files aren't sorted

comm -13 <(sort file1) <(sort file2)