Of course it is possible to use awk-scripts, sed-scripts, perl-scripts and probably another array of programmable text filters for this.

You might be interested to know that Unix offers a genuine tool for exactly your purpose: join. join takes two files as source and generates an output line (which format you can control) for each matching pair of lines.

Here is an example (taken from the join man page of AIX): suppose you have two files, "names" and "phone"

names:

Code:

Adams A.        555-6235
Dickerson B.    555-1842
Erwin G.        555-1234
Jackson J.      555-0256
Lewis B.        555-3237
Norwood M.      555-5341
Smartt D.       555-1540
Wright M.       555-1234
Xandy G.        555-5015

phone:

Code:

Erwin           Dept.  389
Frost           Dept.  217
Nicholson       Dept.  311
Norwood         Dept.  454
Wright          Dept.  520
Xandy           Dept.  999

The command

Code:

join  phone  names

would produce the output:

Code:

# join phone names
Erwin  G.        555-1234        Dept.  389
Norwood  M.      555-5341        Dept.  454
Wright  M.       555-1234        Dept.  520
Xandy  G.        555-5015        Dept.  999

Each line consists of the join field (per default the first field in the line, which is the last name) followed by the rest of the line found in the phone file, then the rest of the line in the names file.

There are options to control the process: display unmatched lines, declare different key values, separators, etc. Notice that join works on sorted files, therefore sorting one or both files before you use them influences output.

I hope this helps.

bakunin