Your life will improve measurably if you make users a hash instead of an array.

Not to discourage anyone from using perl, but you can probably do this as well with cut, sort and comm.

Holy mackerel... So, if I make each line a hash key, and iterate over users I should increment hash value for each time I get a user match against the line.

Then just print out the hash for keys that are zero, or greater than one, depending on whether or not I want to see a list of users that do no match, or do match respectively!

I think that will work. Stay tuned for code...

Very funny Scotty... Now PLEASE beam down my PANTS!

Here's a simple way to take the difference of sets.

use Data::Dumper;
%one = ( 'a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3, 'd' => 4, 'e' => 5, 'f' => 6,);
%two = ( 'a' => -1, 'e' => -2, 'i' => -3, 'o' => -4, 'u' => -5,);
print Dumper(\%one, \%two);

%tmp = %one;
delete @tmp{keys %two};
print Dumper(\%tmp);

%tmp = %two;
delete @tmp{keys %one};
print Dumper(\%tmp);
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Running the above produces the following:

$VAR1 = {
          'e' => 5,
          'c' => 3,
          'a' => 1,
          'b' => 2,
          'd' => 4,
          'f' => 6
        };
$VAR2 = {
          'e' => -2,
          'u' => -5,
          'a' => -1,
          'o' => -4,
          'i' => -3
        };
$VAR1 = {
          'c' => 3,
          'b' => 2,
          'd' => 4,
          'f' => 6
        };
$VAR1 = {
          'u' => -5,
          'i' => -3,
          'o' => -4
        };
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Ditto! However, instead of comm, I tend to use uniq in a pipeline.

cat ${file1} ${file2} ${file2} | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -u

(Slacking off and just doing the easier case for user id in the first field as opposed to the harder case of name extraction from the fifth field.)

Translating this to perl comes up with something like what's given in the following answers, but I find it's handy to test the rough idea on the command line if possible.

(EDIT: Removed the accidental dot between the paragraph and code tags. Moral: don't do markup after midnight.)

Check out the module List::Compare.

#copied from the documentation
use List::Compare;

my @Llist = qw(abel abel baker camera delta edward fargo golfer);

my @Rlist = qw(baker camera delta delta edward fargo golfer hilton);

my $lc = List::Compare->new(\@Llist, \@Rlist);

#get_unique() 
#Get those items which appear (at least once) only in the first list.

    @Lonly = $lc->get_unique;
    @Lonly = $lc->get_Lonly;    # alias
#get_complement() 
#Get those items which appear (at least once) only in the second list.

    @Ronly = $lc->get_complement;
    @Ronly = $lc->get_Ronly;            # alias
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foreach my $line (@file1) {
    if (my @matched = grep {$line =~ /\Q$_\E/i} @users) {
        print "YES @matched is on $line \n";
    } else {
        print "nope...\n";
    }
}
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This will do what the OP said he wanted to do, but should user ed match a line for user ted or fred. The OP will probably be better off isolating (just) the user names from both files, then doing exact matching.

That is true, my code was just meant to solve is state variable quandary.

Without thinking too deeply about it, your noted problem might be solved by simply adding some word boundaries:

    if (my @matched = grep {$line =~ /\b\Q$_\E\b/i} @users) {
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Far out wind... That is exactly the problem I was trying to solve...

How to iterate over the entire list in a (seemingly) atomic operation to see if a list of users could have possibly matched my list of accounts.

I kept thinking a loop in a loop, and that was obviously wrong.

Very funny Scotty... Now PLEASE beam down my PANTS!

Ok, so you can show what users have accounts, unfortunately I'm trying to show the exact opposite. Here is what I came up with:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

# Grep a user OUT of a file, given a list of names, likely from anothe
+r file

# psuedo code:
# if file1 contains a name from file2, skip the line
# if file1 does NOT contain a name from file2, print the line.
#
# I am using this to determine a list of accounts on the partners serv
+er
# that, *maybe*, shouldn't be on there any more.

my @users;
my %lines;
my $file1=$ARGV[0];
my $file2=$ARGV[1];

open FILE1, "<$file1" or die "Cannot open $file1: $!\n";
  # Hasherize it!!!
  foreach my $line (<FILE1>) {
    chomp($line);
    $lines{$line}=0;
  }
close FILE1;

# Create @users array
open FILE2, "<$file2" or die "Cannot open $file2: $!\n";
foreach my $line (<FILE2>) {
  if ($line =~ /#/) {
    my @out=split /\s+/,$line;
    push @users,$out[1];
  }
}
close FILE2;

foreach my $key (keys(%lines)) {
  foreach my $user (@users) {
    if ($key =~ /$user/i) {
      $lines{$key}++;
    }
  }
}

print "List of users not authorized to have an account\n";
foreach my $key (sort keys(%lines)) {
  if ($lines{$key} <= 0) {
    print "$key\n";
  }
}

print "\nList of users authorized to have an account\n";
foreach my $key (sort keys(%lines)) {
  if ($lines{$key} > 0) {
    print "$key\n";
  }
}
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It handily prints out what should be there, and what should not. Now all I have to do is some manual verification, and I can call this a lesson learned.

Many thanks to all those with quick replies, and mostly to jpl for the hint in the direction of hashes.

wind: You code is excellent, but only prints out those folks authorized to have accounts, how would I modify your code to print the inverse list? I tried negating the match (=~ to !=~), but it failed in a quite spectacular way.

UPDATE:
I added a sort into each foreach loop above to print out the lines in alphabetical order.


Very funny Scotty... Now PLEASE beam down my PANTS!

awk '{print $2}' < file1.txt | sort -u > file1.sor
awk '{print $2}' < file2.txt | sort -u > file2.sor
comm -13 file1.sor file2.sor > onlyIn2.sor
comm -23 file1.sor file2.sor > onlyIn1.sor
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