Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,
I am new to linux/
I am writing a script and I want to check if an argument is equal to a field from another file.
for example;
i have a file which has three fields which contain data, and in that file, in 2nd field, there are symbols of currencies of countries.
I want to check that my 2 arguments are equal to that or not.
I tried this if statement, and it doesn't work.
if [ "$1" -ne [`echo "$1" | cut -f2 ~/currency.table`] ].
What should I do?
if i can use any other loop let me know.thanks.

Code:

if [[ "$1" != `echo "$1" | cut -f2 ~/currency.table` ]]

???
Help us to help you !
please post a representative sample of what you have in your file , this will be easier for everybody to help you

in my currency.table file, i have like this
Country Name Symbol Price
United States USA 1.00
so what i want to do is,
check if my 1st argument is equal to the symbol USA, which is in file currency.table

then why do you "cut -f2" ?

USA is the third field :

How is your file formatted ? any other field delimiter than <space> ?

oh sorry,my bad.
its like this
CountryName Symbol Currecny
UnitedStaes USA 1.00

Code:

if [[ "$1" != `grep "$1" ~/currency.table | cut -d" " -f2` ]]

By the way : are you sure your $1 is a sufficient Key that will always match only 1 entry ??

-ne means Not Equal but this is for numeric values only
since you want to compare strings you must use the != instead (so the condition will be true if the strings are found differents)

Code:

if grep -q " $1 " ~/currency.table; then