At 08:54 +0000 2/12/09, hadi motamedi wrote: >Dear All >Can you please do me favor and let me know how can I compare two >files but not in line-by-line basis on my CentOS server ? I mean say >row#1 in file1 has the same data as say row#5 in file2 , but the >comm compares them in line-by-line basis that is not intended . It >seems that the diff cannot do the job as well This'll show you which lines are common to both files, and for the ones that aren't which file they're in. perl -MData::Dumper -le 'while(<>) {chomp; push @{$s->{"$_"}}, $ARGV}; END{ print Dumper($s) }' file1 file2 ... someone will be along shortly with a more elegant method. HTH S.