Thanks Eric and Bob. I had sorted the files before calling comm, but I think the problem is that I sorted them as numeric:
sort -n test1 -o test1 When I removed the "-n", which is equivalent to what Bob has done, comm worked like a charm. Sorry for rushing to file this as bug. Cheers, Ali On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 5:59 PM, Bob Proulx <b...@proulx.com> wrote: > Eric Blake wrote: > > Ali Khanafer wrote: > > > I tried comm on test1.txt and test2.txt. The output I got is in > > > comm-test.txt. Comm found 11 common lines and missed 6 other lines. > > > > > > Could you please explain why this is happening? > > > > Using a newer version of coreutils would tell you why: > > ... > > Proper use of comm requires that you pre-sort both input files. As > > such, this is not a bug in comm, so I'm closing this bug. However, feel > > free to add further comments or questions. > > If you are using bash then a bash specific feature is useful. You can > sort them on the fly. > > comm <(sort test1) <(sort test2) > > Or perhaps forcing a sort locale. > > env LC_ALL=C comm <(sort test1) <(sort test2) > > I included LC_ALL=C to force a specific sort order which may or may > not be appropriate for all of your use cases. > > Bob >
