Can anyone point me in the right direction to compare two files and combine them using awk. Example. File1 Data 2442,Sep,16,2006,ACTIVE 2068,Aug,17,2006,ACTIVE 2245,Sep,20,2006,ACTIVE 2044,Jun,29,2006,INACTIVE File2 Data a024831,2068 a636090,2069 a639911,2044 What I want is to compare the two files and where I see 2068 in file1 and 2068 in file2 create file3 so it looks like this: a024831,Aug,17,2006,ACTIVE I hope I haven't confused anyone...HELP!

At start up, awk loads file2 in an array so that it can reference it while processing each line in file1. awk -F, 'BEGIN { while ((getline < "file2") > 0) f2array[$2] = $1 OFS=","} {if (f2array[$1]) print f2array[$1],$2,$3,$4,$5 #else # print $1 " not listed in file2" > "unmatched" }' file1 You can uncomment the else condition if you want the no matches to be written to a file named unmatched. If this were a shell script doing line by line processing, this would need >> instead of > for appending multiple lines, but awk keeps each output file open until explicitly closed or end of program, so you just need the single > (unless you want to append unmatched lines across multiple awk runs).

I am reposting with the spacing preserved for easier reading. awk -F, 'BEGIN { while ((getline < "file2") > 0)    f2array[$2] = $1 OFS=","} {if (f2array[$1])    print f2array[$1],$2,$3,$4,$5 #else #  print $1 " not listed in file2" > "unmatched" }' file1

Its not displaying any data in the new file I'm creating...here is how I have the script setup... awk -F, 'BEGIN { while ((getline < $DATA2) > 0) f2array[$2] = $1 OFS=","} {if (f2array[$1]) print f2array[$1],$2,$3,$4,$5 }' $DATA1

Inside of the single-quoted awk program, shell variables do not get evaluated.  There are a handful of ways to process shell variables with awk, and I post two solutions below.  The first solution plays tricks with single quotes, and the second solution passes the variable on the command line.  data2 and DATA2 can be the same, but I show them in different case for clarity of the situation. DATA1=file1 DATA2=file2 awk -F, 'BEGIN { while ((getline < "'$DATA2'") > 0) f2array[$2] = $1 OFS=","} {if (f2array[$1]) print f2array[$1],$2,$3,$4,$5 }' $DATA1 DATA1=file1 DATA2=file2 awk -F, -v data2=$DATA2 'BEGIN { while ((getline < data2) > 0) f2array[$2] = $1 OFS=","} {if (f2array[$1]) print f2array[$1],$2,$3,$4,$5 }' $DATA1

I figured it out....thank you for the help/info! It worked like a champ!

How about this in python f2 = open("file2.txt").readlines() number = [] #store numbers for items in f2: ... number.append(items.split(",")[-1].strip() ) for lines in open("file1.txt"): .......for n in number: ..............if n in lines: ....................print lines