Shell Programming and Scripting

I have 1200 or so strings (some strings have spaces, some dont) that I need to match against a 5million line text file. I wanted to do a:

for line in `cat strings.txt`; do grep $line 5mill.txt;done

But obviously that is reading each space as a different $line. So I have been trying to use read, but Im having a tough time getting it to do what I want. I have been tempted to go to perl or php for this but my limited skills are what they are.

Another thing I might point out is that I only need one match per string, there will probably be many for each string.

Im pretty sure that a shell script might not be what I want here, but any advice would be much appreciated.

If the 5 million lines can be read into memory, use this Ruby program.

Code:

strings = IO.readlines( ARGV[0] ).map{|x| x.chomp}
lines = IO.readlines( ARGV[1] )

strings.each{|str|
  lines.each{|line|
    if line.index( str )
      puts line
      break
    end
  }
}

Run it with

Code:

ruby match.rb strings.txt 5mill.txt

Code:

while read line; do
    grep "$line" 5mill.txt
done < strings.txt

Code:

grep -f strings.txt 5mill.txt

or (depending on OS)

fgrep strings.txt 5mill.txt