Dear all,

I have two files in UNIX File1 and File2 as below:

File1:
1,1234,.,67.897,,0
1,4134,.,87.97,,4
0,1564,.,97.8,,1

File2:
2,8798,.,67.897,,0
2,8879,.,77.97,,4
0,1564,.,97.8,,1

I want to do the following:
(1) Make sure that both the files have equal number of columns and if not error out
(2) If there are equal number of columns then compare each corresponding field from both the files line by line and if there is any difference then print the two different values with line number and column number.

I know that 'diff -w' is useful here because it compares ignoring leading, trailing or in-between spaces which is useful because all my columns are numeric.

Can I use say 'awk' and its NF and NR variables along with diff? Or is there any other way? Please advise. I thank you for your help.

GG

Wil all lines in a file have same number of columns?

Yes. All lines have the same number of columsn, it is like a matrix. Thanks.

here's something to start with:

nawk -F',' -f gg.awk File1 File2

gg.awk:

I thank you so much for your reply. It seems to work but I wish to expand the functionality a little further,.by printing labels in the output along with all the currently displaying fields, i.e:

File1:
1,1234,.,67.897,,0
1,4134,.,87.97,,4
0,1564,.,97.8,,1

File2:
2,8798,.,67.897,,0
2,8879,.,77.97,,4
0,1564,.,97.8,,1

File3:
Label1, Label2, ...LabelN

Where File1 and File2 are same as the old files and file3 now contains just one row with labels corresponding to the fields (which are the same labels for both file1 and file2). Can I now display the same output as is generated by your code (gg.awk) except I also want to print these corresponding labels on the far right side when the fields are different so that the output now looks like:

error: [1]::[1] - non-equal fields: [1 != 2] "label1"

error: [1]::[2] - non-equal fields: [1234 != 8798] "label2"

etc...

with the labels coming from file3.

Also, can you also offer some explanation as to what this code is doing. I got a rough idea while exploring it but still some features seem a little advanced to me. Any information would be very useful.

I thank you immensely for all this help,

GG