How do I do a one way diff in Linux?
Normal behavior of diff:
Normally, diff will tell you all the differences between a two files. For example, it will tell you anything that is in file A that is not in file B, and will also tell you everything that is in file B, but not in file A. For example:
File A contains:
cat good dog one two
File B contains:
cat some garbage one a whole bunch of garbage something I don't want to know
If I do a regular diff as follows:
diff A B
the output would be something like:
2c2 < good dog --- > some garbage 4c4,5 < two --- > a whole bunch of garbage > something I don't want to know
What I am looking for:
What I want is just the first part, for example, I want to know everything that is in File A, but not file B. However, I want it to ignore everything that is in file B, but not in file A.
What I want is the command, or series of commands:
???? A B
that produces the output:
2c2 < good dog 4c4,5 < two
I believe a solution could be achieved by piping the output of diff into sed or awk, but I am not familiar enough with those tools to come up with a solution. I basically want to remove all lines that begin with — and >.
Edit: I edited the example to account for multiple words on a line.
Note: This is a “sub-question” of: Determine list of non-OS packages installed on a RedHat Linux machine
Note: This is similar to, but not the same as the question asked here (e.g. not a dupe): One-way diff file
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Answer
diff A B|grep '^<'|awk '{print $2}'
grep '^<'
means select rows start with <
awk '{print $2}'
means select the second column