Re: finding the index at which two strings differ

[Bob Proulx]

Poor Yorick wrote:
> Looking for a simple ways to output the index at which two strings
> differ.  Here is one:
> 
> cmp <(echo "hello") <(echo "help") | cut -d' ' -f5 | tr -d ,
> 
> Any other suggestions?

That seems reasonable to me.  Although I tend to use awk and sed for
such things.  The concept is basically the same as your suggestion
with one less pipe of character I/O.

  awk '{gsub(/,/,"");print$5}'

  sed 's/.*byte \([[:digit:]][[:digit:]]*\),.*/\1/'

I can't think of any way to do this natively in bash.  I can't think
of a better tool than cmp to do this comparison.  But perhaps someone
else more clever than I will have a more elegant solution.

Bob