A command line tool to perform set operations with files

You can install sop using homebrew, go install or building it from source.

> brew install marcosy/tap/sop

> go install github.com/marcosy/sop

Remember to add GOPATH/bin to your PATH:

> export PATH="$GOPATH/bin:$PATH"

You can also build sop from source, just run:

> git clone git@github.com:marcosy/sop.git
> make build

The binary will be saved at ./bin/sop. For other targets, run make help.

sop considers files as sets of elements and performs set operations with those files.

sop [options] <operation> <filepath A> <filepath B>

• operation can be one of:

  • union: Print elements that exists in file A or file B

  • intersection: Print elements that exists in file A and file B

  • difference: Print elements that exists in file A and do not exist in file B

• filepath A and filepath B are the filepaths to the files containing the elements to operate with. Elements are delimited by a separator string which by default is "\n".

• options can be:

  • -s: String used as element separator (default "\n")

Given two files A (fileA.txt) and B (fileB.txt):

fileA.txt:

Fox
Duck
Dog
Cat

fileB.txt:

Dog
Cat
Cow
Goat

sop performs set operations with the files.

The available operations are: union, intersection and difference.

The union of two sets A and B is the set of elements which are in A, in B, or in both A and B.

> sop union fileA.txt fileB.txt
Fox
Duck
Dog
Cat
Cow
Goat

The intersection of two sets A and B is the set containing all elements of A that also belong to B or equivalently, all elements of B that also belong to A.

> sop intersection fileA.txt fileB.txt
Dog
Cat

The difference (a.k.a. relative complement) of A and B, is the set of all elements in A that are not in B.

> sop difference fileA.txt fileB.txt
Fox
Duck

The separator character used to delimitate elements is set by default to the new line character (\n) but can also be configured using the flag -s:

> sop -s , union fileA.csv fileB.csv 

The result sets are not ordered by default, so consecutive executions may return elements in different order. To obtain a consistent order pipe the output of sop to sort:

> sop intersection fileA.txt fileB.txt | sort