Quickly find differences between two large text files

Question

I have two 3GB text files, each file has around 80 million lines. And they share 99.9% identical lines (file A has 60,000 unique lines, file B has 80,000 unique lines).

How can I quickly find those unique lines in two files? Is there any ready-to-use command line tools for this? I'm using Python but I guess it's less possible to find a efficient Pythonic method to load the files and compare.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

If order matters, try the comm utility. If order doesn't matter, sort file1 file2 | uniq -u.

Answer 2

http://www.emeditor.com/ can handle large files and can also compare them.

Answer 3

With 60,000 or 80,000 unique lines you could just create a dictionary for each unique line, mapping it to a number. mydict["hello world"] => 1, etc. If your average line is around 40-80 characters this will be in the neighborhood of 10 MB of memory.

Then read each file, converting it to an array of numbers via the dictionary. Those will fit easily in memory (2 files of 8 bytes * 3GB / 60k lines is less than 1 MB of memory). Then diff the lists. You could invert the dictionary and use it to print out the text of the lines that differ.

EDIT:

In response to your comment, here's a sample script that assigns numbers to unique lines as it reads from a file.

#!/usr/bin/python

class Reader:

    def __init__(self, file):
        self.count = 0
        self.dict = {}
        self.file = file

    def readline(self):
        line = self.file.readline()
        if not line:
            return None
        if self.dict.has_key(line):
            return self.dict[line]
        else:
            self.count = self.count + 1
            self.dict[line] = self.count
            return self.count

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print "Type Ctrl-D to quit."
    import sys
    r = Reader(sys.stdin)
    result = 'ignore'
    while result:
        result = r.readline()
        print result

Answer 4

If I understand correctly, you want the lines of these files without duplicates. This does the job:

uniqA = set(open('fileA', 'r'))

Answer 5

I think this is the fastest method (whether it's in Python or another language shouldn't matter too much IMO).

Notes:

1.I only store each line's hash to save space (and time if paging might occur)

2.Because of the above, I only print out line numbers; if you need actual lines, you'd just need to read the files in again

3.I assume that the hash function results in no conflicts. This is nearly, but not perfectly, certain.

4.I import hashlib because the built-in hash() function is too short to avoid conflicts.

import sys
import hashlib

file = []
lines = []
for i in range(2):
    # open the files named in the command line
    file.append(open(sys.argv[1+i], 'r'))
    # stores the hash value and the line number for each line in file i
    lines.append({})
    # assuming you like counting lines starting with 1
    counter = 1
    while 1:
        # assuming default encoding is sufficient to handle the input file
        line = file[i].readline().encode()
        if not line: break
        hashcode = hashlib.sha512(line).hexdigest()
        lines[i][hashcode] = sys.argv[1+i]+': '+str(counter)
        counter += 1
unique0 = lines[0].keys() - lines[1].keys()
unique1 = lines[1].keys() - lines[0].keys()
result = [lines[0][x] for x in unique0] + [lines[1][x] for x in unique1]

Answer 6

Python has difflib which claims to be quite competitive with other diff utilities see: http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html