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Re: Slickest way to do "joins"/lookups in text files



On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 08:39:37PM -0500, William Ballard wrote:
} In SQL you join tables.  If it's indexed it's fast.
} Can you do this using text files from the prompt?
} 
} Example:
} I'd like to investigate the most popular RSS readers Debian offers.
} 
} $apt-cache search rss | cut -d' ' -f1 > rss.txt
} $wget http://popcon.debian.org/main/by_vote.gz
} 
} I'd like to "filter" by_vote.gz to just the package names
} in "rss.txt".  In SQL this would be a join.  I'd like it
} to be "fast".  Do I have to do this in SQL?

When you are matching whole words, and those words are each alone on a
line, you can use fgrep -f, as in:

zcat by_vote.gz | fgrep -f rss.txt

It isn't a general tabular join solution, but it works pretty well for this
particular purpose.

--Greg



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