Comparing two files with out sorting AWK

user_12632203 0
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I have two files like this:

Animal Food
cat    fish
Dog    meet
cow    grass

second file:

Animal Food Price
cat    fish  45
Dog    meet  47
Got    grass 74

I just want to compare these two files based on the first and second column as like this:

Animal Food Price
cat    fish  45
Dog    meet  47

Usually, I will perform this with the JOIN function but in this case, sorting is not possible. I need results exactly the same order as on file 1 Then I tried with AWK as like this:

awk 'NR==FNR {$1 = $2; next} {print}' file1 file2

But it is producing some duplicate results and different order.

awk regex
2 Answers

You may use:

awk '{k = $1 FS $2} NR == FNR {map[k]=$3; next} k in map{print $0, map[k]}' f2 f1

Animal Food Price
cat    fish 45
Dog    meet 47
user_5482250

You actually can do it with join and sorting is possible, you just have to decorate the input to join with the original line numbers so you can re-sort on those line numbers again in the output:

$ cat tst.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash

encode() {
    awk '{print $1 SUBSEP $2, NR, $0}' "${@:--}" |
    sort
}

decode() {
    sort -k2,2n "${@:--}" |
    awk '{sub("^([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+){"NF/2+1"}","")} 1'
}

join <(encode "$1") <(encode "$2") | decode

.

$ ./tst.sh file1 file2
Animal Food Price
cat fish 45
Dog meet 47

In real life I'd just go with what @anubhava has of course, unless I ran into memory issues or similar, the above is just for the sake of demo-ing an alternative.

user_17450010
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