5

I have $a and $b. I want to run diff on those.

The best I have come up with is:

diff <(cat <<<"$a") <(cat <<<"$b")

But I have the district feeling that I am missing a clever Bash syntax to do that (as in "Why don't you just use foo?").

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
18

echo. Clearly less weird.

#!/bin/bash

a="`seq 10`"
b="`seq 0 11`"

diff <(echo "$a") <(echo "$b")
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7
  • 2
    How do you use this in a bash script? Trying to output a diff of two strings using this syntax and I get "syntax error near unexpected token `('" Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 20:03
  • 5
    I figured out why I couldn't get it to work. Process substitution is a bash feature, which is usually not available in /bin/sh. My bash script had the wrong shebang. Was #!/bin/sh but should have been #!/bin/bash. Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 22:02
  • I am getting the same error even though I'm using #!/bin/bash, is there something I am missing? Commented May 21, 2019 at 15:14
  • 2
    @Loupax Are you maybe running the script with sh scriptname? Commented May 21, 2019 at 19:21
  • @Kusalananda You got me, I'll look up what shell sh actually is Commented May 22, 2019 at 6:38

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