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The join command in UNIX is a command line utility for joining lines of two files on a common field. It can be used to join two files by selecting fields within the line and joining the files on them. The result is written to standard output.
To join two files using the join command files must have identical join fields. The default join field is the first field delimited by blanks. For the following example there are two files foodtypes.txt and foods.txt.
cat foodtypes.txt
1 Protein
2 Carbohydrate
3 Fat
cat foods.txt
1 Cheese
2 Potato
3 Butter
These files share a join field as the first field and can be joined.
join foodtypes foods.txt
1 Protein Cheese
2 Carbohydrate Potato
3 Fat Butter
To join files using different fields the -1 and -2 options can be passed to join. In the following example there are two files wine.txt and reviews.txt.
cat wine.txt
Red Beaunes France
White Reisling Germany
Red Riocha Spain
cat reviews.txt
Beaunes Great!
Reisling Terrible!
Riocha Meh
These files can be joined by specifying the fields that should be used to join the files. Common to both files is the name of the wine. In wine.txt this is the second field. In reviews.txt this is the first field. The files can be joined using -1 and -2 by specifying these fields.
join -1 2 -2 1 wine.txt reviews.txt
Beaunes Red France Great!
Reisling White Germany Terrible!
Riocha Red Spain Meh
Join expects that files will be sorted before joining. For this example suppose there are two files from the previous example are not sorted.
cat wine.txt
White Reisling Germany
Red Riocha Spain
Red Beaunes France
cat reviews.txt
Riocha Meh
Beaunes Great!
Reisling Terrible!
Running join on these files results in an error becuase the files are not sorted.
join -1 2 -2 1 wine.txt reviews.txt
join: wine.txt:3: is not sorted: Red Beaunes France
join: reviews.txt:2: is not sorted: Beaunes Great!
Riocha Red Spain Meh
Beaunes Red France Great!
The sort command can sort the files before passing to join.
join -1 2 -2 1 <(sort -k 2 wine.txt) <(sort reviews.txt)
Beaunes Red France Great!
Reisling White Germany Terrible!
Riocha Red Spain Meh
To specify a field separator for joining using the join command use the -t option. An example is a CSV file where the separator is ,. In the following example there are two files names.csv and deposits.csv.
cat names.csv
1,John Smith,London
2,Arthur Dent, Newcastle
3,Sophie Smith,London
cat transactions.csv
£1234,Deposit,John Smith
£4534,Withdrawal,Arthur Dent
£4675,Deposit,Sophie Smith
Using the -t option the comma can set as the delimiter.
join -1 2 -2 3 -t , names.csv transactions.csv
John Smith,1,London,£1234,Deposit
Arthur Dent,2, Newcastle,£4534,Withdrawal
Sophie Smith,3,London,£4675,Deposit
To specify the output format of join use the -o option. This allows the order of fields that will be shown in the output to be defined, or for only certain fields to be shown.
In the previous example the output we as follows.
John Smith,1,London,£1234,Deposit
To specify the order the list of fields are passed to -o. For this example this is -o 1.1,1.2,1.3,2.2,2.1. This formats the output in the order desired.
join -1 2 -2 3 -t , -o 1.1,1.2,1.3,2.2,2.1 names.csv transactions.csv
1,John Smith,London,Deposit,£1234
2,Arthur Dent, Newcastle,Withdrawal,£4534
3,Sophie Smith,London,Deposit,£4675
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