Shell Programming and Scripting

Because the input data I was reading while writing the script
was different (the post was modified;
ghostdog74's post is showing the original sample)
Try this:

Code:

awk 'NR==FNR{ gsub(/[ \(\)-][A-Z]*/,"");x[$0];next}
{gsub(/ /,"")}!($0 in x)' file1 file2

thank you very much

Hi Radoulov,

How to restrict the gsub to start from a certain position,
Can we use the substr in conjunction with gsub,

nawk 'NR==FNR{ gsub(/[ \(\)-]/,"");x[$0];next}
{gsub(/[ \(\-]/,"")}!($1 in x)' file11.csv file22.csv

Is substituting all the "-" to spaces as a result the
If the first column has the "-" it is overidden.

Is displays 1023,JONES D,7037891249 from the example.

FILE1:

1-023,SMITH JAMES, (203) 789-1249
10-23,HARRY POTTER, (213) 789-1249
1-023,JONES D, (903) 789-1249

FILE2:

1-023,SMITH JAMES,2037891249
10-23,HARRY POTTER, 2137891249
1-023,JONES D,7037891249

Output should be:

1-023,JONES D,7037891249

As the phone number is different.


Thanks a lot for your help

S

Code:

$ cat file1
1-023,SMITH JAMES, (203) 789-1249
10-23,HARRY POTTER, (213) 789-1249
1-023,JONES D, (903) 789-1249

$ cat file2
1-023,SMITH JAMES,2037891249
10-23,HARRY POTTER, 2137891249
1-023,JONES D,7037891249

$ nawk 'NR==FNR{gsub(/[ \(\)-]/,"",$3);x[$0];next}
> {sub(/ /,"",$3)}!($0 in x)'  OFS="," FS="," file1 file2
1-023,JONES D,7037891249

It worked like a magic

Thanks a lot

can you please explain what you are doing in the "sub" to compare

sub is not there for comparisons, instead it substitutes the values in this way (/Matchpattern/SubstitutePattern/) like in this case sub(/ /,"",$3) it'll substitute any spaces in the third column with "" that means it'll remove spaces from third colum, in the same way gsub is functioning in this script, gsub(/[ \(\)-]/,"",$3) has match pattern /[\(\)-]/ ie match a ( or ) or - and replace it with "" null value means remove it, actual comparison is being done thru arrays and Radoulov has desdribed it earlier.

Regards,
Tayyab