Hi.
Perhaps I had more luck -- I didn't have to wait so long for a definitive answer. On 2 different machines, I had 2 large, similar, but different files of size about 1 GB. One machine had 2.5 GB memory, the other 1 GB. When I used
diff, I got the message:
Code:
diff: memory exhausted
Exit status: 2
So I sorted the files and ran:
Code:
comm -3 file1 file2
On one machine the elapsed time for
comm was 3 minutes (2.8 GHz Xeon, RHEL 4), and on the other, 2.5 minutes (AMD-64, 3000+, Debian sarge).
You may need to glance at
man comm to see what it is doing -- it does require sorted input files, and then presents unique entries in both files.
Best wishes ... cheers, drl