UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I need help on appending certain field in my file1.txt based on matched patterns in file2.txt using awk or sed.

The blue color need to match with one of the data in field $2 in file2.txt. If match, BEGIN and FINISHED value in red will have a new value from field $3 and $4 accordingly.


file1.txt

Code:

ID   N_4736
NAME   N_4736
BEGIN  544
FINISHED  550
COM    Safe  

ID    N_32
NAME   N_32
BEGIN    872
FINISHED   1027
COM   Crash

Input file2.txt

Code:

test1     4754    120      160
test1     4736    500      600
test1     5487    1478     200      
test1     32      800      1000

The output should look like this:-

Code:

D   N_4736
NAME   N_4736
BEGIN  500
FINISHED   600
COM    Safe  

ID    N_32
NAME   N_32
BEGIN    800
FINISHED  1000
COM   Crash

I really don't know how to do this. pls..appreciate your help or advise on this. Thanks

Well, it is a join and update, really join and create new file. You might want to avoid the cartesion join NxM costs of unsorted data. If you grock the SQL mind, rows/tuples have no implicit order or position vertically, and columns/attributes have no implicit horizontal order/position. You could put all the new data in associative arrays in bash or perl, and then look it up as you go through the old replacing to write the new, which works for small new data. An associative array looks like a vector or array my_array_name[xxx] but xxx does not have to be integer 0 to (n-1), (or one to in COBOL :-) ), it can be any string.