Poor Yorick wrote: > Looking for a simple ways to output the index at which two strings > differ. Here is one: > > cmp <(echo "hello") <(echo "help") | cut -d' ' -f5 | tr -d , > > Any other suggestions?
That seems reasonable to me. Although I tend to use awk and sed for such things. The concept is basically the same as your suggestion with one less pipe of character I/O. awk '{gsub(/,/,"");print$5}' sed 's/.*byte \([[:digit:]][[:digit:]]*\),.*/\1/' I can't think of any way to do this natively in bash. I can't think of a better tool than cmp to do this comparison. But perhaps someone else more clever than I will have a more elegant solution. Bob