How to count differences between two files on linux?

Posted by Zsolt Botykai on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Zsolt Botykai
Published on 2009-10-14T14:06:21Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 19:01 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 581

Filed under:

diff

|

differences

|

count

|

large-files

|

shell

Hi all,

I need to work with large files and must find differences between two. And I don't need the different bits, but the number of differences.

For the differ rows I come up with

diff --suppress-common-lines --speed-large-files -y File1 File2 | wc -l

And it works, but is there a better way to do it?

And how to count the exact number of differences (with standard tools like bash, diff, awk, sed some old version of perl)?

Thanks in advance

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about diff

newline-ignoring diff / diff across multiple lines / reflow-ignoring diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does anybody know of a diff-like tool that can show me the changes between two text files, but ignore changes in whitespace including newlines? Here's an example: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy bear. the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy bear. the quick brown fox jumped over the… >>> More
Unix diff to only print relevant diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have these two files File:11 11 12345 File:22 123 456 Output of diff 11 22 2c2 < 456123 --- > 789 Output to be < 456123 > 789 I want it to not print 2c2 and "--" line. I looked at the man page but could not locate any help. Any ideas? The file has more than 1K lines >>> More
How to make meld prefer an SVN diff over a CVS diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
We have some directories that are tracked in both CVS and SVN (loooong story). When I change a file in one of these and run meld it diffs it against the SVN version. However for some of the other developers it diffs against CVS. Is there a way to specify which one gets priority? Everyone is using… >>> More
Is there a JS diff library against htmlstring just like google-diff-match-patch on plain text?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Currently I am using google-diff-match-patch to implement a real-time editing tool, which can synchronize texts between multiple users. Everything works great when operations are only plain texts, each user's operation(add/delete texts) could be diff-ed out by comparing to old text snapshot with the… >>> More
Paragraph-based diff program?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does anyone know of a diff viewer or comparison program that can do paragraph-based differentials? My repos has a large number of LaTeX files that are formatted into 80-character wide paragraphs (for easy editing with vim). It's currently very difficult to interpret the diffs between various versions… >>> More

Related posts about differences

Linq find differences in two lists

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have two list of members like this: Before: Peter, Ken, Julia, Tom After: Peter, Robert, Julia, Tom As you can see, Ken is is out and Robert is in. What I want is to detect the changes. I want a list of what has changed in both lists. How can linq help me? >>> More
Does "diff" exist for images?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
You can compare two text files very easy with diff and even better with meld: If you use diff for images, you get an example like this: $ diff zivi-besch.tif zivildienst.tif Binary files zivi-besch.tif and zivildienst.tif differ Here is an example: Original from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tux… >>> More
Technically speaking, what is different about Ubuntu compared to other Linux distributions?

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
This is a question that's puzzled me for quite a while (and refers to the differences between all distributions). In my mind, a distribution is: a pre-configured OS, with some pre-installed packages, some created by the distribution's community that are unique to that distribution (e.g. apt-get)… >>> More
How to count differences between two files on linux?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi all, I need to work with large files and must find differences between two. And I don't need the different bits, but the number of differences. For the differ rows I come up with diff --suppress-common-lines --speed-large-files -y File1 File2 | wc -l And it works, but is there a better way… >>> More
4 Important Differences Between SEO and SEM

as seen on Ezine Articles - Search for 'Ezine Articles'
If you are a new-fangled to the Internet marketing, you possibly will have a number of questions concerning the differences between SEO & SEM. Well, these interior marketing subjects are really in fact very different. >>> More