Dear friends,
I have two data both sorted on the first field having same record length in ascending orders.
In the first file I have only two fields and only 100 or max 1200 records seperated with ":" and saved in foo1 .

The second file is masters file having all the rquired information like address and pincode etc, a very large file from which only 6 to 8 fields are required.The required fields are extracted in foo2 .

Using grep will fetch whole record , I want only certain fileds only.

I have used the commd:
join -a1 1 -a2 1 -t: -o 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 foo1 foo2 > foo3

Result whole data of foo2 <the large file> gets extracted??

Is ther any limitation for join command because man pages have very small writeup on the commd.
Help is solicited ? Pleeeease !!

With due respect to mastroe