Question

I have a file that’s the result of the comm command, it has 2 columns, I wish to separate these 2 columns into two different files, how do I do that?

the file looks like:

a
b
         g
         f
c
d

Answer 1

Depending on the column separator, you can do something like:

cut -f1 orig_file >file1
cut -f2 orig_file >file2

Here the column separator is supposed to be a TAB. If it is another character, you can use the -d char option to cut.

If you want to remove empty lines, as per your request, you can add to each line a sed command:

cut -f1 orig_file | sed -e /^$/d >file1
cut -f2 orig_file | sed -e /^$/d >file2