Question

I am very new to the shell scripting world. I have done some research on this but seems not working so far.

What I am trying to do is I have two txt files. I want to search all the strings from file A in File B, and display all the lines from file B that has the strings in it.

So far, I only have this(please don’t laugh)…

#!bin/sh
for LINE in 'cat $1'
do
grep '$LINE' $2
done

I guess I am trying to make it dynamic, so I can execute something like this

./script.ksh fileA.txt fileB.txt

Any suggestion would be appreciated and thanks so much!

Answer 1

You were very close to your goal, but there are some minor errors in your code.

This should work:

#!/bin/sh
for LINE in `cat $1`
do
    grep "$LINE" $2
done

Here’s an example:

fileA.txt:

Hi
Hello
Hairy
Harry
Hates
His
Home

fileB.txt:

James Bond likes Harry
Sylvia is cool
Fiona is mad
Hello there
Hairy toenails

Output:

Hello there
Hairy toenails
James Bond likes Harry