mjhjmtu

I am new at programming, so please bear with me. I'm trying to use the comm command to compare two logs to see which apps have been installed but not removed. I don't want to use awk for this, if possible. Here's and example of the files:

Installed:

2009-03-21 11:43:21 install flex-old:amd54 <none> 3.7.4a-10ubuntu1
2009-03-22 22:55:08 install libubsan0:amd54 <none> 6.3.0-1ubuntu1~14.04

Removed:

2009-03-24 19:53:49 remove libubsan0:amd54 <none> 6.3.0-1ubuntu1~14.04

So the one that would need to be found as different is the "flex-old" line. Here is what I have tried, with some other variations:

comm -23 <(sort install.txt) <(sort removed.txt) > difference.txt

This outputs all of the installed list, not just the ones that aren't in common with the remove list. I've also tried:

comm -3 <(cut -d " " -4f sort install.txt | uniq) <(sort removed.txt | uniq) > what.txt

But, this outputs all the apps from both, but with the removed directly under the install.
Any help is appreciated :)

Looks like you were pretty close to me. Based on your samples, the following 1 liner:

comm -23 <(sort install.txt | cut -d" " -f4) <(sort removed.txt | cut -d" " -f4)

Produced this for output for me:

flex-old:amd54

NOTE: You may want to tweak the comm -23. For example, comm -3 may be all you need here.

What I did to test. First, I broke down your commands to test them. I started with:

cut -d " " -4f sort install.txt

Which was clearly broken, so I fixed that to:

sort install.txt | cut -d" " -f4

After that (based on my experience), I was able to re-write your one liner without further testing. If that failed, I would have performed a basic test with comm to see what was wrong, but there was no need this time :]