join 2 text files based on first number present in every line of the 2 text files
 

All,

I have 2 text files : file1.txt and file2.txt
cat file1.txt
15 this is a sentence containing various words and spaces
34 this is a another sentence containing various words and spaces

cat file2.txt
2 this is sentence1file2
6 this is sentence2file2
54 this is sentence3file2


I would like to join these 2 files. The result should look as follows :
cat joinedfile.txt

2 this is sentence1file2
6 this is sentence2file2
15 this is a sentence containing various words and spaces
34 this is a another sentence containing various words and spaces
54 this is sentence3file2

==> so the joined file must be sorted on the first number. Any ideas how this can be achieved ?

thanks in advance.

Hi,
Use a shell script to take out line by line of first text file.
And call an gawk script which checks whether $1 is greater that the first word of the given line (it got from shell command as input) and if so append in previous line, and exit the gawk script.
Hope I am clear. Anyway gawk is the best thing to do such tasks...
-All the best.
indiajoe

All you need is "cat" + "sort"
Example---I generated 2 files--join1 and join 2:

@pixellany

Your solution is indeed sufficient for my needs.

Thanks a lot !

You don't even need cat:
sort -n file1 file2