Kurt V. Hindenburg wrote:Slight problem with this, it won't work. Diff(1) takes two arguments, which are filenames(or directories) and compares the two, the special filename '-' tells diff to read from stdin, but even then you would only get one of the files with the unwanted lines removed.
Anyone know a diff program that you can skip # lines at the beginning of each files? Googling for diff is about worthless...
Pipe trough tail. 'tail -n +#' outputs everything from the #th line to the last, so 'tail -n ## | diff' (where ## = # + 1) does what you want).
A small shell script like this would do the job(where $numlines is number of lines to be ignored):
tail -n +$numlines file1 > file1.tmp tail -n +$numlines file2 > file2.tmp diff file1.tmp file2.tmp
Obviously this would need beefing up to make it a proper script with arg handling and so on, and also the line numbers output would be off by the amount stripped from the beginning of the file. You could post-process the diff output, to make the line numbers correct in relation to the original files.
-Bruce
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