Shell Programming and Scripting

did you try the above code?
it will work.
Are you trying to do that using array and grep?
then show us your code

My bad,

My problem was with this line which had an extra filename in the piped grep:
grep -w $a file2 |grep -w $b file2 >/dev/null

Should be like you said which works perfectly.

grep -w $a file2 |grep -w $b >/dev/null

My file 1 is about 1000 lines and my file 2 is over 1 million. It was taking about 4 hours with the array so I'm betting this will also be much faster as well.

Thanks a heck of a lot!