Shell Programming and Scripting

Okay, first of all, thanks to everyone who's helped me out before... I appreciate the opportunity to learn.

I have two iTunes XML files, and I simply want to compare the contents, then merge. Theoretically, this will allow me to merge two libraries, keeping playlists intact (depending on iTunes' xml interpreter and how picky it is).

As such, how would you compare two xml files and merge them?

Code:

man diff and paste

Diff would compare line by line, correct?

If one file is shorter than the other by no more than a line, I've already gotten a false positive and a duplicate line.

If iTunes XML is anything like Rhythmbox XML, there will be attributes which include systime of when the file was imported. If I were you, I would create a hash while parsing/printing the first XML file where the key doesn't include values such as systime (or other values that will always be distinct) of the song file then loop over the second XML in a similar fashion printing only nodes where key was not found in the first.

Do a web search for diffxml & patchxml