Diff, show modified line from right file only

Question

I have file a and b and I would like to output lines of b that changed since it was cloned from a. Just the modified lines, no surrounding context, no diff offset marks.

How can I do that using shell scripting? (No Python/Perl/PHP/...)

Sed and awk are acceptable solutions.

For now, what I am doing is diff -y with --suppress-common-lines and sed using regex backreferences to just fetch the right part after the whitespace. There must be a better way?

Using perl (which is forbidden), I´d do something like this:

diff -y --suppress-common-lines -W $COLUMNS Eclipse_Preferences_Export_*.epf | perl -pe 's/.*\t|\t(.*)$/\1/g'

score 51 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 25 '12 at 14:31

51

With GNU diffutils package's diff this will output only lines from file b which either were modified or newly inserted:

diff --unchanged-line-format= --old-line-format= --new-line-format='%L' a b

answered Nov 25 '12 at 14:31

manatwork

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Awesome. Shame the info is buried in the Texinfo and no hint is provided in the man page I was reading.. – Robottinosino Nov 25 '12 at 15:05

score 6 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 07 '14 at 14:24

6

You have to add one more option :

grep -vf file1 file2

edited Jul 07 '14 at 14:24

Nidal

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answered Jul 07 '14 at 13:47

Sri

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While this doesn't require the lines to be sorted, I think grep uses a lot more memory and will crash for large files. – Sridhar Sarnobat Aug 17 '17 at 04:14
doesn't work if lines are duplicated either – Jayen Nov 02 '18 at 09:05
incorrect answer, the correct use of grep is this: grep -vxF -f file1 file2 – Badr Elmers Sep 29 '21 at 04:33

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 05 '14 at 05:29

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awk 'FNR==NR{old[$0];next};!($0 in old)' old.txt new.txt

answered Oct 05 '14 at 05:29

1kenthomas

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Diff, show modified line from right file only

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