Question

I’m new on linux SO and bash commands and i think someone with more experience could help me. I wanna compare 2 different text files with log’s of an execution, but some lines (not all of them) begin with a time’ token like this:

12345 ps line 1 content 
23456 ps line 2 content 
line 3 content 
345 ps line 4 content

Those tokens have different values in each log, but, in that comparison, i don’t care about them, i wanna just to compare the line contents and ignore them. I could use ‘sed’ command to generate new files without that tokens and then comepare them, but i pretend to do that repeatedly and could save me some time if i use just one command or one sh file. I’ve tried to use ‘sed’ and ‘diff’ combined, but without success. Would anyone please be able to help me?

Answer 1

You can use the following sed one liner to remove the numbers from the beginning of the file:

sed 's/^[0-9]* ps//g' file1

To diff two such files (less timestamps) you can use process substitution.

diff <(sed 's/^[0-9]* ps//g' file1) <(sed 's/^[0-9]* ps//g' file2)