Reading Each Line of an input file, performing grep on each line. 2

[TunaAdmiral]

I have a file with thousands of lines consisting of serial numbers (1 serial per line, fixed length of six characters each).

I need to do a grep for each serial number on another file.

So, if the first three rows of my serial number file are:

A12345
B12345
C12345

Then the following grep operations need to be performed:

grep A12345 serialhistory.txt
grep B12345 serialhistory.txt
grep C12345 serialhistory.txt

How do i do this in a script?

Thanks!

 

[Ogzilal]

Hi,

grep -f /path/to/serial.txt /path/to/another_file.txt

with serial.txt is your file containing serials

 

[KenCunningham]

The -f option seems to depend on the flavour of grep (Solaris 8 vanilla doesn't have it for example). You could also:

while read name
do
grep name another_file.txt
done < serial.txt

I want to be good, is that not enough?

 

[KenCunningham]

Apologies,

grep name another_file.txt should be

grep $name another_file.txt

I want to be good, is that not enough?

 

[bigoldbulldog]

What does serialhistory.txt look like? If both files are sorted you may consider using comm, or even join. Let man be your friend.

Cheers,
ND

 

[columb]

I second Ken's suggestion as a general 'how to do repeated actions using lines in a file' method. Just to add my twopenny worth, if the lines in the file have spaces then you may have trouble. This can be cured by settign IFS to newline i.e.

#Set IFS to newline
export IFS='
'

while read name
do
  action "$name" 
done < input file

or, in your case

export IFS='
'
while read name
do
  grep "$name" another_file.txt
done < serial.txt

Ceci n'est pas une signature
Columb Healy

 

[TunaAdmiral]

Thank you all so much! I'm thrilled with the number and quality of the responses I received! The grep -f did the trick nicely. As it happened, there were no spaces on the lines, so the newline issue never surfaced.

Thanks again, folks!