hmmm... I don't how to ask the question I guess. And I did not understand a lot of what is going on in your suggestion, vgersh99. I feel like I am making this more complicated than I need to. I found a work around, as inelegant as it is:

I have 10 lists. Each list contains all of the subject numbers, one number per line, grouped by experimental condition. Because I dont know how to make grep read patterns from file, I used vi to insert:

Code:

grep '[subject number]' all.inq >> [0-9].inq

around the subject number on every line, saved it as $ec.grep and then ran the file as a shell script:

Code:

$>sh [0-9].grep

This solved the first problem.

Now, what I want to do now is very simple. I have a list of subject numbers (call it sn.all). I have a second list (call it sn.rm) of subject numbers that need to be deleted from the first list. I have about 500 subject numbers, and I have 60 something that need to be deleted. I want to somehow compare sn.all to sn.rm, and remove all numbers in sn.rm from sn.all and create a new file calls sn.fin.

I hope this makes sense. The fact that I don't know what I am doing makes this harder.

Chris