Difference in report files

[columb]

I have a daily report file which looks something like

Report for 25 June 2007
data
data
data
....

What I want to do is send an e-mail if the data in todays report is different from yesterdays. The problem, of course, is that, even when the data is the same the different date means I can't use a straight diff.

I could, of course, copy the two files, minus their first line, into temporary files and compare them but there must be a better way.

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Columb Healy

 

[feherke]

Hi

If your [tt]diff[/tt] has parameter -I to ignore lines matching a regular expression :

diff -I '^Report for ' columbtoday columbyesterday

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[columb]

Thanks feherke. My RedHat boxes do, my AIX boxes don't and, of course, the reports are on the AIX system. I might copy down the source code and update the AIX diff!

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Columb Healy

 

[PHV]

What about this ?
diff file1 file2 | sed '/^1c1$/,/> Report for /d'

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[columb]

Hmm...
What I was looking for was the equivalent of

diff file1 file2 >/dev/null && mail -s daily_report me@home < file2

but I could use your idea to do something like

[[ $(diff file1 file2 | sed '/^1c1$/,/> Report for /d' | wc -l) -gt 0 ]] && mail -s daily_report me@home < file2

Thanks PH

Ceci n'est pas une signature
Columb Healy