diff files comparing only first n characters of each line

linux comparison diff md5 md5sum
Speckinius Flecksis picture Speckinius Flecksis · May 18, 2011 · Viewed 7.3k times · Source

I have got 2 files. Let us call them md5s1.txt and md5s2.txt. Both contain the output of a

find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort > md5s.txt

command in different directories. Many files were renamed, but the content stayed the same. Hence, they should have the same md5sum. I want to generate a diff like

diff md5s1.txt md5s2.txt

but it should compare only the first 32 characters of each line, i.e. only the md5sum, not the filename. Lines with equal md5sum should be considered equal. The output should be in normal diff format.

Answer

sehe picture sehe · May 18, 2011

Easy starter: 

diff <(cut -d' ' -f1 md5s1.txt)  <(cut -d' ' -f1 md5s2.txt)

Also, consider just

diff -EwburqN folder1/ folder2/

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