Need help with unix command

[GT98]

Ok I have the following three files:

File1.txt					File2.txt			File3.txt
Smith Furniture Co.                            101			Active
Wells Manufacturing                           202			Inactive
Rose Department Store		           314			     Active
Haywood Resort			               184			 Inactive
Martha Stewart & Co.		             341		       Unknown

And I need to use a UNIX command to display the following, out of those three txt files

101 Smith Furniture Co. Active

Any suggestions or hints?

[Jessterw]

What relation do the files have to the items you listed below?
Does one file contain the name, one the number/id, and one the state?

If the latter is correct then you're going to need more of a script to handle this sort of aggregate output.

Depending on if you are wanting to output a specific set or all would determine what you need for output, but basically you will need to loop through the lines of each file and concatenate the values as you specified. *You would grab the values for the same line in each file, output, and then proceed to the next line in each file.

[Wombat]

You really haven't given enough information here to be clear. Was that the name of the three files, plus example data?

grep -n "101 Smith Furniture Co. Active" *.txt

[GT98]

I fixed the formatting problem I had when I posted this...does this make it clearer?

I basically need to take infomation from each text file and have it output as a single line following this example:

101 Smith Furniture Co. Active

[Jon P. Inghram]

I think gcc or whatever equivalent your Unix system has would probably be the best command for doing this.

[TnT]

Do you need to display them all at once (ie merge the files) or do you need to do random access on a single row?

[Tjalfe]

http://www.cgr.harvard.edu/cbg/scriptome/UNIX/Tools/Merge.html

perl -e '$col1=1; $col2=0;' -e '($f1,$f2)=@ARGV; open(F1,$f1); while (<F1>) {s/\r?\n//; @F=split /\t/, $_; $line1{$F[$col1]} .= "$_\n"}; warn "\nJoining $f1 column $col1 with $f2 column $col2\n$f1: $. lines\n"; open(F2,$f2); while (<F2>) {s/\r?\n//; @F=split /\t/, $_; $x = $line1{$F[$col2]}; if ($x) {$x =~ s/\n/\t$_\n/g; print $x; $merged++}} warn "$f2: $. lines\nMerged file: $merged lines\n";' ortho.tab human_func.tab > fly_func.tab

[GT98]

Do you need to display them all at once (ie merge the files) or do you need to do random access on a single row?

single line with the selected information as in the example...

[Wombat]

I'm still not totally clear on what PART of that stuff you're searching for, but I came up with something. I hope you can read shell script.

I assumed you're doing something like ./searchscript File1.txt File2.txt File3.txt Smith

The only tricky part about this one is that most people don't know how to use file descriptors. I open your files as descriptors 4, 5, and 6, and then read from them, slap that all together as a line, and grep for your search string in the merged line.

FILE1="$1"
FILE2="$2"
FILE3="$3"
SEARCH="$4"

exec 4< $FILE1
exec 5< $FILE2
exec 6< $FILE3

while read -u 4 line1
do
	read -u 5 line2
	read -u 6 line3
	total_line="$line1 $line2 $line3"
        echo $total_line | grep $SEARCH
done

[GT98]

duh this was easy....the command I need is this

ls | paste File2.txt File1.txt File3.txt

[Jessterw]

Ahhh... yes, now I see what you were wanting to do. In that case you might want to also try:

ls | paste -s -d'\t\t\n' File2.txt File1.text File3.txt

That'll give you a tab-delimited listing of all the lines in the files (in the format you desire).