Here is my no code sugestion, since you seam to be needing more ideas than working code ;-)

You could make a script that acepts who file names as command line parameters.

Then proced to parse the first file, in blocks of two lines a piece, puting the info into a hash with the person's name as the hash key.

Next, parse the second file, and for each name, look it up in the hash key. If it's there, add the second file's info to the hash with that key and put a flag in there marking it as "ok", otherwise print the second files parsed info into a mismatches file.

The final thing is run the hash, and for each key that doesn't have the ok flag, put it's info into the mismatches file.

Hope this helps, altough it would not be terribly eficiente for large files, because it builds a hash linearly as big as the first files size.

In reply to Re: Merging files by sevensven
in thread Merging files by ellem

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