Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The intersection and set difference (A-B) on text files


Intersection and set difference operations are commonly used in mathematical classes on set theory. However, similar operations on strings are also very helpful in some scenarios.

Getting ready

The comm command is a utility to perform a comparison between the two files. It has many good options to arrange the output in such a way that we can perform intersection, difference, and set difference operations.

  • Intersection: The intersection operation will print the lines that the specified files have in common with one another

  • Difference: The difference operation will print the lines that the specified files contain and that are not the same in all of those files

  • Set difference: The set difference operation will print the lines in file "A" that do not match those in all of the set of files specified ("B" plus "C" for example)

How to do it...

Note that comm takes only sorted files as input. Take a look at the following example:

$ cat A.txt
apple...