<perl newbie puts head above parapet for first time - cautiously - to humbly offer an approach that doesn't use arrays (so it can handle BIG files) and ignores keys only present in one of the input files> 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open ONE, "1.txt"  or die "Cannot open 1.txt to read\n $!";
open TWO, "2.txt"  or die "Cannot open 2.txt to read\n $!";
open TRE, ">3.txt" or die "Cannot open 2.txt to write\n $!";

while (<ONE>) {
  chomp;
  (my $onea, my $oneb) = split(/\|/);

  my $twoa = undef;
  my $twob = undef;
  while (! eof(TWO))
  {
    my $two = <TWO>;
    chomp $two;
    ($twoa, $twob) = split(/\|/, $two);
    last if ($twoa ge $onea);
  }

  if ($onea lt $twoa) {
    next;
  }
    else {
    print TRE "$onea\|$oneb\|$twob\|\n" if ($onea eq $twoa);
  }
}

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In reply to Re: combining 2 files with a comon field by anotherstevew
in thread combining 2 files with a comon field by jjohhn

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