Table of Contents

Situation

Often times I want to preprocess files a bit before running a diffing tool such as vimdiff on them. For example, say I have two files - file1.txt, file2.txt . Instead of doing “vimdiff file1.txt file2.txt”, I would like to do 

cut -f 1 file1.txt | sort > file1.txt_sorted
cut -f 2 file2.txt | sort > file2.txt_sorted
vimdiff file1.txt file2.txt
rm file1.txt_sorted file2.txt_sorted

The task here is to simplify this process.

Solution

vimdiff <(cut -f 1 file1.txt | sort) <(cut -f 1 file2.txt | sort)

This tip works with other diffing tools such as diff. The cool thing is that we no longer have to worry about managing temporary files.

System Information

Tested it on zsh 4.3.10