Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi , all
join command can join 2 files, but what about "multijoin"??
if a list of files and an integer are given as input, how to join these files and sort them according to the field number of this integer. Default field is the join field for all the joins.

example:
file 1 = Chris King
file 2 = Chris Funny
file 3 = Chris Small
Chris Big
>multijoin file1 file2 file3 -k 4
result:
Chris King Funny Big
Chris King Funny Small

So, first step is to join file1 and file2, then put it in a file, may call it file10, then join it with file 3, right? but for it's recursive,

i cann't do like this
for i in $*
join $i $i+1 like in other programming languages.
so how to make the output of last join joined with the next file, i really get confused~

well, it's a homework problem, so does anyone have idea??
thanks in advance

Tracy

please try the script below
if the input file is file1 through file3
multijoin.sh
#!/usr/bin/ksh
c=1
for f in file?
do
if [[ c -eq 1 ]];
then
cat $f > tmp
c=2
else
join $f tmp > tmp1
mv tmp1 tmp
fi

done
cat tmp
rm tmp