file compare and result output
 

hello;

i have two files 100kactivesept.csv and 100kactivevms.csv the two files are really long, however i want to spit out both results of field1 in file1 that are not in field 2 of file 2, and the vice versa, field 2 in file1 not in field one in file 1. hope am making sense.

As far as I could understand your requirement, if you want only 2nd field of first file and 1st field of second file, then do as:
1st file:
% more <filename> | awk -F"," '{print $2}' > /tmp/firstfile.txt
and for 2nd file:
% more <filename> | awk -F"|" '{print $1}' > /tmp/secondfile.txt
Then you'll get your desired output in /tmp/firstfile.txt and /tmp/secondfile.txt.
Moreover if you want to merge output of both /tmp/firstfile.txt and /tmp/secondfile.txt in columned manner, use following cmd:
% paste /tmp/firstfile.txt /tmp/secondfile.txt

Hope it will help you, else explain your question little more.

THIS DOES NOT GIVE THE DESIRED OUTPUT, I WOULD Like to get field ones that are not in field to of file 1, sort of like a vlookup

^ what have you tried so far... i think awk, grep, sed, cut, ... would be useful in this exercise.

i would change one of the files so that the fields match and run grep -f -v in a while loop.

To be honest, your question is not so clear that what exactly you want. Better explain with some example and elaborate.

Yes, please give examples and written explanation of how some parts of each file match. In the sample you provide, I can see almost no matching strings. For the sake of optimization, it would be useful to know a few more things:

• are the records in each file ordered/sorted in any way?
• are the records in each file unique (can a record in either be duplicated)?
• is the order of the output records significant?
• is there any positional correspondence between the records? i.e. does record #1 correspond to record #1 in each file?

That last one points to the possibility of some very lengthy searches. It may be necessary to scan each record of each file for every record of the other file, or even twice if you need to do the reverse comparison.
Your second sample file doesn't really look like a CSV formatted file. Are we to assume what the field delimiters are?

--- rod.