setdiff

setdiff is a small command line utility to compare two line-oriented files using set operations.

Features

• Set difference (A \ B or B \ A)
• Set intersection
• Set union
• Symmetric difference with line prefixes
• Unique lines (symmetric difference)

Installation

Build from source using Cargo:

cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be located at target/release/setdiff.

Usage

setdiff [OPTIONS] <FILE1> <FILE2>

Exactly one mode option must be provided:

• --only-first – show lines only in FILE1 (A \ B).
• --only-second – show lines only in FILE2 (B \ A).
• --common – show the intersection of both files.
• --union – show the union of both files.
• --diff – display a symmetric difference with lines from FILE1 prefixed by < and lines from FILE2 prefixed by >.
• --unique – list lines that appear in exactly one of the files.

Lines are sorted and deduplicated before the operation is performed.

Example

$ cat a.txt
apple
orange
banana

$ cat b.txt
banana
kiwi
orange


$ setdiff --only-first a.txt b.txt
apple

$ setdiff --unique a.txt b.txt
apple
kiwi

Testing

Run the test suite with:

cargo test

License

This project is released under the MIT license.