Hi, There are two files in UNIX system with some lines are exactly the same, some lines are not.
I want to compare these two files.The 2 files (both the files have data in Column format )should be compared row wise and any difference in data for a particular row should lead to storage of data of second file in another new third file.
i.e here we are assuming second file( file 2 ) to be updated version of first file (file 1) and any difference in row wise matching would lead to storage of the updated /modified data in another third file .


Please help me ASAP

check if diff can solve your problem

hi yogesh diff is NOT solving the problem ( i have tried that)..
bcoz the output apart from giving the difference in file contents is also displaying line numbers and other special kind of instructions ...

we got to pick up only the modified data from this third file .. so diff doesn't work out here properly
for eg below is one such display

1c1,2
< 1|2|2|2|4|3
---
> 1|2|3|2|3|4
>

Thank you

do let us know in case of any other options

So then pipe the diff output through a filter which just selects the changes you interested in, say by looking for lines either begining with < or >.

Porter here NOT all lines begin in same way/with same special characters

even i tried following the same stuff ( as suggested by u ) long time back

diff file1 file2 > diff_file.txt
cut -d"|" -f1 diff_file.txt|egrep -v ",|-|>|<" > final.txt

field 1( f1) was the desired field which was to be picked up from the diff_file.txt file .. but again problem is that the diff_file.txt contained the line numbers in some places Also
(note: diff_file.txt has huge number of rows of data) ,so these unwanted line numbers which lie in same column as the field 1 data also gets picked up with the field1 data

eg line numbers like 4d3,5a5 etc
Note :file 1 n file 2 contains numbers as data
so i want final.txt file to have pure numbers only

Perhaps grep might help.

Eg.

Hey Vino thanks a lottt !!!!! ..but again ur suggestion is applicable only when both the files have certain contents which are unique to that particular file and NOT found in other one ...

for eg
two files file3 having contents
bat
mat
rat

and file4 having contents
bat
rat
hat

in such case grep -vf file3 file4
would display only "hat" and not rat because rat is present there is file 3

but our criteria is that
rat as well as hat should be displayed as we are matching the column contents row wise ONLY.. so here the values at second and third place of file 4 differ from those of file 3 so accordingly i want rat and hat to be displayed
any idea