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Comm Command

The comm command compares two sorted files line-by-line and outputs three columns showing lines unique to each file and lines common to both. It can suppress specific columns and output to a CSV file that can be opened by spreadsheet programs. Examples demonstrate using comm to compare a recipe file and shopping list, isolate shared and unique items, and create a CSV for further analysis in LibreOffice Calc.

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36 views8 pages

Comm Command

The comm command compares two sorted files line-by-line and outputs three columns showing lines unique to each file and lines common to both. It can suppress specific columns and output to a CSV file that can be opened by spreadsheet programs. Examples demonstrate using comm to compare a recipe file and shopping list, isolate shared and unique items, and create a CSV for further analysis in LibreOffice Calc.

Uploaded by

Darko
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Linux comm command

Updated: 04/01/2018 by Computer Hope

• About comm
• comm syntax
• comm examples
• Related commands
• Linux and Unix commands help

About comm
Compare two sorted files line-by-line.

Description
Compare sorted files FILE1 and FILE2 line-by-line.
With no options, comm produces 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.
Each of these columns can be suppressed individually with options.

comm syntax
comm [OPTION]... FILE1 FILE2
Options
-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 string STR

--help display a help message, and exit.

--version output version information, and exit.

Examples
Let's say you have two text files, recipe.txt and shopping-list.txt.
recipe.txt contains these lines:
All-Purpose Flour
Baking Soda
Bread
Brown Sugar
Chocolate Chips
Eggs
Milk
Salt
Vanilla Extract
White Sugar

And shopping-list.txt contains these lines:


All-Purpose Flour
Bread
Brown Sugar
Chicken Salad
Chocolate Chips
Eggs
Milk
Onions
Pickles
Potato Chips
Soda Pop
Tomatoes
White Sugar
As you can see, the two files are different, but many of the lines are the same. Not all of the recipe
ingredients are on the shopping list, and not everything on the shopping list is part of the recipe.
If we run the comm command on the two files, it will read both files and give us three columns of
output:
comm recipe.txt shopping-list.txt

All-Purpose Flour
Baking Soda
Bread
Brown Sugar
Chicken Salad
Chocolate Chips
Eggs
Milk
Onions
Pickles
Potato Chips
Salt
Soda Pop
Tomatoes
Vanilla Extract
White Sugar

Here, each line of output has either zero, one, or two tabs at the beginning, separating the output into
three columns:
1. The first column (zero tabs) is lines that only appear in the first file.
2. The second column (one tab) is lines that only appear in the second file.
3. The third column (two tabs) is lines that appear in both files.
(The columns overlap visually because in this case, our terminal prints a tab as eight spaces. It might
look different on your screen.)
Next, let's look at how we can bring our separated data into a spreadsheet.

Creating a CSV file for spreadsheets


One useful way to use comm is to output to a CSV file, which can then be read by a spreadsheet
program. CSV files are just text files that use a certain character, usually a comma, tab, or semicolon, to
delimit data in a way that can be read as a spreadsheet. By convention, CSV file names have the
extension .csv.
For instance, let's run the same command, but this time let's redirect the output to a file called
output.csv by using the > operator:
comm recipe.txt shopping-list.txt > output.csv

This time there is no output on the screen. Instead, output is sent to a file called output.csv. To check
that it worked correctly, we can cat the contents of output.csv:
cat output.csv

All-Purpose Flour
Baking Soda
Bread
Brown Sugar
Chicken Salad
Chocolate Chips
Eggs
Milk
Onions
Pickles
Potato Chips
Salt
Soda Pop
Tomatoes
Vanilla Extract
White Sugar

To bring this data into a spreadsheet, we can open it in LibreOffice Calc:


Before it opens the file, LibreOffice asks us how to interpret the file data.
We want the column delimiter to be tab characters, which is already checked by default. (There are no
commas or semicolons in our data, so we don't have to worry about the other checkboxes.) It also gives
us a preview of how the data will look, given the options we selected.
Everything looks good, so we can click OK, and LibreOffice will import our data into a spreadsheet.
Now if we wanted to, we could save the spreadsheet in another format such as a Microsoft Excel file,
or an XML file, or even HTML.

Suppressing columns
If you only want to output specific columns, you can specify the column numbers to suppress in the
command, preceded by a dash. For instance, this command will suppress columns 1 and 2, displaying
only column 3 — lines shared by both files. This isolates the items on the shopping list that are also
part of the recipe:
comm -12 recipe.txt shopping-list.txt

All-Purpose Flour
Bread
Brown Sugar
Chocolate Chips
Eggs
Milk
White Sugar

The next command will suppress columns 2 and 3, displaying only column 1 — lines in the recipe that
are not in the shopping list. This shows us what ingredients we already have in our cupboard:
comm -23 recipe.txt shopping-list.txt

Baking Soda
Salt
Vanilla Extract

And the next command will suppress column 3, displaying only columns 1 and 2 — the items in the
recipe that are not on the shopping list, and the items on the shopping list that are not in the recipe, each
in their own column.
comm -3 recipe.txt shopping-list.txt

Baking Soda
Chicken Salad
Onions
Pickles
Potato Chips
Salt
Soda Pop
Tomatoes
Vanilla Extract

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