Home / server / Questions / 219585
In Process
Nitrodist
Asked: 2011-01-07 12:24:15 +0800 CST

diff variables within a script

  • 772

I realize that the diff command is reserved for directories/files, but I've seen it being able to read from standard input, so that's not necessarily true.

Is it possible to somehow compare two variables that were stored in a ksh script?

The code looks like this:

a=$(cut -c 1-10 first_file.txt)
b=$(cut -f '3' -d ' ' second_file.txt)

#what I would like to do
$(diff $a $b) > differences.txt
scripting diff

1 Answers

  1. Use process substution (thanks, Dennis!) as described here. This would probably do it

    diff <(echo $a) <(echo $b)

    At least, that worked for me in bash on cygwin.

    • 1