Man1 - comm.1

comm - compare two sorted files line by line

comm [/OPTION/]… FILE1 FILE2

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’.

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.

Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.

GNU coreutils online help: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
Report any translation bugs to https://translationproject.org/team/

Copyright © 2021 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.

join(1), uniq(1)

Full documentation https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/comm
or available locally via: info ’(coreutils) comm invocation’