This sounds like you might have carriage returns or extra whitespaces at line ends in (at least one of) the original files. That's just a guess of course.

Update: you have to sort the lines (with the fields you want to join as keys) if you want to join the files. You didn't forget that, did you?

In reply to Re^5: Joining two files on common field by ambrus
in thread Joining two files on common field by ch1

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