I want to get the correct number of lines in the output of diff(specifically with -y and --suppress-common-lines options). Using a simple wc -l does not work, because if both files end without a newline and their last line is different wc -l won't count the last line.
Is there a simple and efficient solution to avoid this?
For example, if you have files "a":
a
b
c
d #no newline here
And "b":
a
b
c
D #no newline here
The output is:
$ diff -y --suppress-common-lines a b | wc -l
0
Which is obviously incorrect since diff does output a line.
Best Answer
There is no newline, so
wc -lis correct. Instead, you want to count the number of start of lines. One way to do it: