On Unix-like operating systems, the comm command compares two sorted files line-by-line.

This page covers the GNU/Linux version of comm.

Description

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.

  • Description
  • Syntax
  • Options
  • Examples
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

Syntax

comm [OPTION]… FILE1 FILE2

Options

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:

  • The first column (zero tabs) is lines that only appear in the first file.
  • The second column (one tab) is lines that only appear in the second file.
  • The third column (two tabs) is lines that appear in both files.

(The columns overlap visually because 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 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 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 looks, 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 column.

comm -3 recipe.txt shopping-list.txt

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

cmp — Compare two files byte by byte.diff — Identify the differences between two files.join — Join the lines of two files which share a common field of data.sort — Sort the lines in a text file.uniq — Identify, and optionally filter out, repeated lines in a file.