Vimdiff - How to extract similar lines in files and output them to a file
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21-08-2019 - |
Question
I am new to vimdiff and had a question about outputting the similarities of the two or more files into a new file. For example, based on the following picture I would like to have b,c,e,f,a along with the names of the two files being compared outputted to a different file.
An example file template for this might be:
[file1's name][file2's name]
lines that were similar between both files
Is there any built in vim command to do this or some bash script I could write that would be able to extract the data needed from vim? Thank you in advance!
Solution
You could use regular diff to get the output if you have it installed:
diff --unchanged-line-format='%L' --old-line-format='' \
--new-line-format='' a.txt b.txt
You would run that from the command line on Linux. Or from within Vim you would run it by typing :! first as follows:
:!diff --unchanged-line-format='%L' --old-line-format='' \
--new-line-format='' a.txt b.txt