hey guys, newbie here, so pardon me for asking a basic question.

I have 2 commands that I need to run consecutive and my script writing has failed me. These are all in tab delimited files.

What I want to do:
1. Extract 5th column from fileX (cut command)
2. Compare results from extracted column with fileY (comm command)
3. Output the comparison results in fileZ

So far, this is what I have:
$ comm fileY (cut -f5 fileX) > fileZ
$ comm fileY '(cut -f5 fileX)' > fileZ
$ cut -f5 fileX | comm fileY > fileZ

I know these are all wrong. How should I write the script to do that? I have tried back-quotes and parenthesis and they all have either syntax error or claim file not found.

You are looking for process substitution:

This is bash specific, so make sure you have #!/bin/bash at the top of your script and not #!/bin/sh. Most programs use "-" as a name for stdin, so you can also do

That is not bash specific.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks ntubski!

Please mark as SOLVED once you have a working solution