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I have a thousand files and I need to verify if they all have exactly the same information in the second column up to a certain number of lines. Below an example. I would like to print the names of the files if the first 5 lines of the second columns of the files file1.txt and file2.txt were not equal. In this case the result should show: "difference between files file1.txt and file2.txt"

file1.txt

jose 50 maria 50 fernando 50 andres 50 martin 30 pablo 30 . . .

file2.txt

julia 50 julio 50 alan 50 ruth 50 ana 40 manuel 40 . . .
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  • Are you only going to compare two at a time? Commented Apr 18, 2019 at 20:11
  • No, I want to compare the files file2.txt, ..., file999.txt with the first (file1.txt) Commented Apr 19, 2019 at 4:55

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Hmm. I think I would do a for loop through the files and compare then with comm.

/tmp ❯ comm -3 <(cat file1.txt|awk '{print $2}') <(cat file2.txt|awk '{print $2}') ⏎ 30 30 40 40

Note the 30's and 40's are output from the files. Some basic usage of comm: comm -1 -3 <(sort -u FILE1.txt) <(sort -u FILE2.txt)

  • -1 suppress lines unique to FILE1
  • -2 suppress lines unique to FILE2
  • -3 suppress lines that appear in both files

So to put all this together something like:

cd /path/to/files && find . -type f -name "*.txt" | while read filename do echo "*** Checking $filename ***"; comm -3 <(cat reference.txt|awk '{print $2}') <(cat $filename|awk '{print $2}'); echo ""; done
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