Excellent!! what a useful thing to know. Ok this is probably a dumb question but why is it telling me 
join  -t '\t' -a1 -1 16 -2 2  PTCL_All.txt Cosmic_Counts_By_Gene.txt 
join: illegal tab character specification
<\code>

or 
<code>join  -t '<tab>' -a1 -1 16 -2 2   PTCL_All.txt Cosmic_Counts_By_
+Gene.txt 
join: illegal tab character specification

[download]
Isn't -t ' CHAR' the correct format for specifying the delimiter in the output? Also if I use join  -t ',' -a1 -1 16 -2 2   PTCL_All.txt Cosmic_Counts_By_Gene.txt The output seems to be much more different than just a comma delimeter being added to the command  join   -a1 -1 16 -2 2   PTCL_All.txt Cosmic_Counts_By_Gene.txt Am I doing this correctly? the latter just looks like what I want with spaces separating the columns( the same number of lines as file 1), while the former seems to create a million repeats of each line (many many many more lines than what is in either file).

In reply to Re^2: Adding a particular column from one file to a second file by ZWcarp
in thread Adding a particular column from one file to a second file by ZWcarp

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