Hi, I have two text files containing records in following format: file1 format is: name1 age1 nickname1 path1 name2 age2 nickname2 path2 file 1 example is: abcd 13 abcd.13 /home/temp/abcd.13 efgh 15 efgh.15 /home/temp/new/efgh.15 file 2 format is: name1 age1 nickname1 name2 age2 nickname2 file 2 example: abcd 13 abcd.13 efgh 21 efgh.21 file 2 is the current (up-to-date) file, and file 1 is the one that needs to update it's records to match file2. file1 contains records that might not exist in file2, and these records need to stay as-is. however, when updating, as in the above example, record efgh needs to be updated to reflect file2's values, so output should look like this: output file: abcd 13 abcd.13 /home/temp/abcd.13 efgh 21 efgh.21 /home/temp/new/efgh.21 how can i achieve this with korn shell scripting (using awk maybe?) thanks

awk 'FNR==NR{ a[$1] = $0; next } (( $1 in a ) && ( a[$1] !~ $3)) { split(a[$1],b," ") gsub( $1".*$" ,b[3],$4) printf "%s %s\n" ,a[$1] ,$4 next }1 ' file2 file1