Question

I’m not sure if this is a very basic question or if I’m making progress, but what I’m trying (and failing) to do is compare two files with diff, then print a certain column from a selected row from the output. Basically one cell therefore is the output I want.

diff fileA fileB | ta=$(awk '{print $2}') | awk 'FNR==2'  $ta

obviously doesn’t work because $ta isn’t a file.

What’s the best (easiest or fastest) way to do this?

Answer 1

Not really sure what you want to achieve, but this should do it

diff fileA fileB | awk 'FNR == 2 {print $2}'