Hi guys,

I have the following problem using a combination of grep and awk commands.
I have an input ascii file (let's call it tmp1) which looks like this:
1234
789
889

and a second file, tmp2, with various columns, in the format:
3838 3328898 789 2398493
1234 3283298 84290 0238438
889 2311201 001 3234389

I would like to match these two files using the FIRST column of the two files
as a reference, i.e. . Example:
If you take the entry in the first line of tmp1 (1234), it matches well
with the second line of tmp2, as they both contain in their first column
the same entry. The same happens for the third line of the two files,
as they both contain the entry 889 in the first column of both files.
If I use a script such as:

for id in $(awk '{print $1}' tmp1)
do
grep [[:space:]]$id[[:space:]]
done

I will also select the first line of tmp2, which I do not want as the value 789
in tmp2 is NOT found in the first column.

Could anyone give some help?

Thanks in advance,

Thodo

First, your script does not reference the file "tmp2"--looks like you left something out.

Second, why the space before "$id"? If you want to match $id at the beginning of the line, you need "^$id" (or maybe "^\$id")

Hi,

I indeed forgot the tmp2 in the do loop when typing the thread. My files were having spaces before the numbers you see, so the \^ option would not work. In any case, ghostdog74's answer solved my problem.

Thanks to both of you for answering!

Cheers,

Thodo