and the next issue is that you're only looping thru the second file once; to be able to compare every line of file1 against every line of file2, you're going to need to parse the second file multiple times (ie, nested loop); alternatively, grab all of file2 into an appropriate data structure, and compare each line of file1 to each entry in the file2 data structure (or vice versa, or both into data structures, then just compare the data)

update1

#!perl
open (FILE1, $ARGV[0]);

while ($_ = <FILE1>) {
    chomp;
    @FILE1 = split;
    ($FILE1letter, $FILE1number) = @FILE1;

    open (FILE2, $ARGV[1]);
    while( $two = <FILE2> ) {
        @FILE2 = split(' ',$two);
            ($FILE2letter, $FILE2number) = @FILE2;
            #   print "$FILE1letter from FILE1 with number $FILE1numbe
+r and $FILE2letter from FILE2 with $FILE2number match\n";
            #   prints the same as below

        if ($FILE1letter eq $FILE2letter) {
            print "$FILE1letter from FILE1 with number $FILE1number an
+d $FILE2letter from FILE2 with number $FILE2number match\n";
        } else {
            print "$FILE1letter from FILE1 with number $FILE1number an
+d $FILE2letter from FILE2 with number $FILE2number DO NOT match\n";
        }
    }
    close (FILE2);
}
__END__
C:\Temp>perl ab.pl a b
A from FILE1 with number 1_1 and A from FILE2 with number 2_1 match
A from FILE1 with number 1_1 and B from FILE2 with number 2_2 DO NOT m
+atch
A from FILE1 with number 1_2 and A from FILE2 with number 2_1 match
A from FILE1 with number 1_2 and B from FILE2 with number 2_2 DO NOT m
+atch
B from FILE1 with number 1_3 and A from FILE2 with number 2_1 DO NOT m
+atch
B from FILE1 with number 1_3 and B from FILE2 with number 2_2 match
C from FILE1 with number 1_4 and A from FILE2 with number 2_1 DO NOT m
+atch
C from FILE1 with number 1_4 and B from FILE2 with number 2_2 DO NOT m
+atch

[download]

In reply to Re^4: Simple comparison of 2 files by pryrt
in thread Simple comparison of 2 files by Q.and

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