On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:41 PM, hari prasadh <hariprasad...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Is there anyway to compare two doc files in linux(centos).i tried with diff > command and it is not working. > doc files have tons of meta data like author, date and times. A direct comparison using tools like diff will almost always fail. Since you have mentioned in the other message that you only want to compare text content and not formatting, you could possibly use the following method... Install LibreOffice and run the following command to convert the doc file to plain text: libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to txt:Text filetoconvert.doc After this, you will have all the text in a file called filetoconvert.txt Run the stream editor `sed` to remove all blank lines: sed '/^$/d' filetoconvert.txt > convertedandstripped.txt Now you can run `diff` to find simple differences. If you want to compare in a more intelligent fashion, open the text file using your favorite programming language and write the logic :) If you are going to call LibreOffice from within your shell script or php script or any other app, use the following command. I struggled to make it work and took hours of internet searching! export HOME=/tmp && libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to txt:Text filetoconvert.doc LibreOffice requires a valid home directory. All the best. Regards, Arun Venkataswamy http://wondroussky.blogspot.in/ "கற்றது கைமண் அளவு, கல்லாதது உலகளவு" - ஔவையார் Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
