[Discuss] join question [RESOLVED]

[pw]

pw wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am joining some files in bash and getting some unexpected
> behavior from the 'join' command. I am working with cygwin
> so I can script text files for use with some windows utilities
> since bash, in most respects, is much better for this than DOS.
> (until now)
> 
> My files only have one column each so at the surface
> one would think the following would work:
> 
> join -t "|" file_a file_b
> 
> In this case I am using the '|' character as a delimiter.
> Join does nothing...
> 
> I am then thinking that rows may require at least one
> delimiter for join to work. In that vein I add a delimiter
> to the end of each row and run the command again.
> Join does nothing...
> 
> Then I think join may need a delimiter on either side of
> any single column. To that end I reformat my input data
> to have a '|' character both before and after the data on
> each row. I run the command once again.
> Join suddenly springs to life, joining like crazy.
> The only problem is I get all the lines in file_b joined to
> each line in file_a. Thus file_b is repeated file_a.numlines
> times...
> 
> The command worked fine for files with more than
> one column of data.
> 
> Am I missing a flag?
> Is bash broken on cygwin?
> Does the join command work?
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?
> 
> Peter


This has been resolved.

1.) I needed a common index column in each file.
2.) index columns may not contain whitespace characters

Peter