As hinted at in one of the earlier replies, sometimes it's worth the effort to create a suitable utility to make a "simple" operation even simpler. It also allows you to add in some useful flexibility that will help to make your command line usage more effective with less typing.

I have to do a lot of "join"-like operations (actually, things like intersections, unions, and xors) on pairs of arbitrary lists or tables that vary as to delimiters and locations of key fields, so I wrote this "general purpose" tool: cmpcol. You haven't shown any samples of your data yet, so I don't know whether this tool might be useful to you, but I've had occasion to use it (and be glad to have it) just about every day since I wrote it.