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What kind of difference output do you want if diff gives you &quot;the wrong kind of output&quot;? diff delineates what's inserted (or appened) c/w what's changed. Tell us what you *do* want and we'll see what we can do.
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What kind of difference output do you want if diff gives you "the wrong kind of output"? diff delineates what's inserted (or appened) c/w what's changed. Tell us what you *do* want and we'll see what we can do.

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Thanks for the replies. &nbsp;The output I want is exactly what Heem14s answer gives. &nbsp;ie. the extra lines between an archived copy of a log file, and the current copy. &nbsp;In that example, you only need -3, and providing you have the larger file first, then the output is perfect.<br />
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I'll leave this open for a day or two longer in case there are more replies.<br />
<br />
Steve :)
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Thanks for the replies.  The output I want is exactly what Heem14s answer gives.  ie. the extra lines between an archived copy of a log file, and the current copy.  In that example, you only need -3, and providing you have the larger file first, then the output is perfect.

I'll leave this open for a day or two longer in case there are more replies.

Steve :)

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I would like to see the changes (only additions) that have been made since I last took a backup of a text file (eg. &nbsp;/var/log/messages)<br />
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I tried &quot;diff oldfile newfile&quot;, but that produces the wrong kind of output. &nbsp;So I thought about doing a &quot;wc -l&quot; on the old file, then printing all the line from the result of wc -l, to the end of the file using sed. &nbsp;This would probably work, but something inside me is nagging saying there's a better way of doing this.<br />
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Any ideas?<br />
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Thanks,<br />
Steve :)
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I would like to see the changes (only additions) that have been made since I last took a backup of a text file (eg.  /var/log/messages)

I tried "diff oldfile newfile", but that produces the wrong kind of output.  So I thought about doing a "wc -l" on the old file, then printing all the line from the result of wc -l, to the end of the file using sed.  This would probably work, but something inside me is nagging saying there's a better way of doing this.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Steve :)

Producing differences between 2 text files

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