Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have two data file with multiple columns and multiple rows.Columns are separated by '|' delimiter.
Now I want to campare 1st column of both these files and delete the whole row for that column, which has entries in both the files, from one of the file.

I am providing a possible solution thats three lines long. But if you explore the 'join' command in unix, I am sure you would work out shorter versions:

Let your first file be a.txt, and your second file be b.txt. And you wish to remove the unwanted lines from a.txt. Heres how we go about this:


sort -t'|' -k1 a.txt >temp_a
sort -t'|' -k1 b.txt >temp_b
join -t'|' -o 1.1 temp_a temp_b|sed 's/^/\^/'|grep -f - a.txt


Regards,
Abhishek