Shell Programming and Scripting

How to get diff to not print the chevrons and the dashes? In this case the differences are all single line differences.

Also the first few lines don't matter. How to get the output to always exclude the first few lines? Thanks!

It's difficult to figure out what *exactly* you want without a concrete example. Please do post if you have one.

Maybe the diff output for your files with single-line differences looks like this?

Code:

$
$ cat f74
this is line 1
this is line 2
this is line 3
this is line 4
this is line 5
$
$
$ cat f75
this is line 1
this is line 2
this is line 30
this is line 4
this is line 5
$
$
$ diff f74 f75
3c3
< this is line 3
---
> this is line 30
$
$

You could process them further like so -

Code:

$
$ # print lines with no chevrons and dashes
$
$ diff f74 f75 | grep "^[^-]" | sed 's/^[><]//'
3c3
 this is line 3
 this is line 30
$
$

"grep" removes the lines that start with a dash ("-").
And thereafter, sed removes the chevrons (if present) from the remaining lines.

Not sure what you meant by this:

In the example above, if we exclude the first few lines, there will be nothing to display. There are only 4 lines in the actual diff output.

tyler_durden