To speed this up, you could read the first file into a hash, using the words as keys and the numbers as values. Then you could read through the second file and output the multiplication of the hash lookup as the result.

As you haven't shown any code, neither will I.

@Corion: thank you very much. I'll try to change my (poor script) according to your suggestion, and post it later here.

Wrapped. Needs mods for *nix shells:

sort file1>file1.s 
& sort file2>file2.s 
& join file1.s file2.s 
| perl -anle"print$F[0],' ',$F[1]*$F[2]" 
| sort -n -k 2 > files.merged 
& del file1.s file2.s

c:\test>type files.merged
hello 1
FILE 2
today 6
yes 8
well 12
[download]

@BrowserUk; Thanks, it works. I'm though trying to come up with a pure perl solution, without any sort command, as sorting my cause problems. The two lits may also be slightly different.

without any sort command, as sorting my cause problems.

Why would do you think sorting would cause cause problems?

The two lits may also be slightly different.

Different how? If it is anything other than casing, it will screw up most solutions.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

RIP an inspiration; A true Folk's Guy

Try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %HASH;
open(F1,"file1");
while (<F1>) {
    chomp;
    my ($k,$v) = split /\s+/,$_,2;
    $HASH{$k} = $v;
}
close(F1);

open(F2,"file2");
while (<F2>) {
    chomp;
    my ($k,$v) = split /\s+/,$_,2;
    if (exists $HASH{$k} ) {
        $HASH{$k} *= $v;
    }else{
        $HASH{$k} = $v;
    }    
}
close(F2);

# write output to file
open(OUT,">newfile");
while (my ($k,$v) = each %HASH) {
    print OUT "$k $v\n";
}
close(OUT);
[download]

@ahmad: THANK YOU VERY MUCH. It works great!!! 1000 better as my original script!

I'll endorse ahmad's solution. I'd just point out that the magical quality of @ARGV can be handy for this kind of data munging and that chomp %hash chomps the hash's values.

Be well,
rir

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

@ARGV = qw/ file1 file2/;

my %h;

while ( <> ) {
    /(\S+)\s+(\S+)/;
    $h{$1} = $h{$1} ? $h{$1}*$2 : $2;
}

print "$_ $h{$_}\n" for sort { $h{$a} <=> $h{$b} } keys %h;
[download]

I'm late to the party as usual, but...

This problem reminds me of the algorithm certain sites use to determine the similarity between scientific articles. First they define a wordlist containing vocabulary of the relevant scientific fields. This list will form the basis of a vector field. Then they assign a vector to every article in their database; the i-th element of the vector being the number of occurrences of the i-th word from the list. The similarity of two articles is calculated by the scalar product of the (normalized) vectors belonging to the two articles - which makes perfect sense, since the scalar product of two unit vectors is the cosine of the angle between the vectors, so the above definition basically calculates the angle between the word-vectors.