Linux manual pages Section 1  

Name

comm — compare two sorted files line by line

Synopsis

comm [OPTION...] FILE1 FILE2

DESCRIPTION

Compare sorted files FILE1 and FILE2 line by line.

When FILE1 or FILE2 (not both) is −, read standard input.

With no options, produce three−column output. Column one contains lines unique to FILE1, column two contains lines unique to FILE2, and column three contains lines common to both files.

−1

suppress column 1 (lines unique to FILE1)

−2

suppress column 2 (lines unique to FILE2)

−3

suppress column 3 (lines that appear in both files)

−−check−order

check that the input is correctly sorted, even if all input lines are pairable

−−nocheck−order

do not check that the input is correctly sorted

−−output−delimiter=STR/

separate columns with STR

−−total

output a summary

−z, −−zero−terminated

line delimiter is NUL, not newline

−−help

display this help and exit

−−version

output version information and exit

Note, comparisons honor the rules specified by 'LC_COLLATE'.

EXAMPLES

comm −12 file1 file2

Print only lines present in both file1 and file2.

comm −3 file1 file2

Print lines in file1 not in file2, and vice versa.

AUTHOR

Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS

GNU coreutils online help: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>

Report any translation bugs to <https://translationproject.org/team/>

SEE ALSO

join(1), uniq(1)

Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/comm>

or available locally via: info '(coreutils) comm invocation'

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.