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How to make a strict match with awk

I am querying one file with the other file and have them as following:

File1:

Angela S Darvill| text text text text   
Helen Stanley| text text text text   
Carol Haigh S|text text text text .....

File2:

Carol Haigh  
Helen Stanley  
Angela Darvill

This command:

awk 'NR==FNR{_[$1];next} ($1 in _)' File2.txt File1.txt

returns lines that overlap, BUT doesn’t have a strict match. Having a strict match, only Helen Stanley should have been returned.

How do you restrict awk on a strict overlap?

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Answer

With your shown samples please try following. You were on right track, you need to do 2 things, 1st: take whole line as an index in array a while reading file2.txt and set field seapeator to | before awk starts reading file1

awk -F'|' 'NR==FNR{a[$0];next} $1 in a' File2.txt File1.txt

Command above doesn’t work for me (I am on Mac, don’t know whether it matters), but

awk 'NR==FNR{_[$0];next} ($1 in _)' File2.txt. FS="|" File1.txt

worked well

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