I want to compare particular line of two text file and update one of the file if they are not same.
Updating a line in a text file is technically not possible (unless the replacing line is of exactly the same length). You have to create a new file, which you can, in the end, move to the old one.
From your tags, I assume that you are looking for a shell solution, which is maybe not a good idea. It's probably more convenient to do it in, for instance, Perl or Ruby or Python.
One possibility is to use the commands head
and tail
, which allow you to dissect a file into parts. You can split your file into three parts: The part before the line in question, the line itself, and the lines which come after.
Another possibility is to use a loop and the read
command of the shell to process a file line by line, like this:
while read line
do
... # Decide here, whether to write $line or the replacement line
done <your_file