join of two files on common field is not working correctly

[manouche]

Hello,

I have been struggling with this for some time now, but can't quite get it. I have two files that I would like to join on a common field. The common field is the first field in both and numerical. I have presorted each file and the result is that the first field in each file is sorted numerically. So, then I run a join:

join file1 file2 > file3

The result is 1) the resulting file misses a group of lines that are common based on the first field, and only goes up to 99998, when both inividual files have an ending number of 140876. 2) 'join: file 2 is not in sorted order'

As I said, both files are numerically sorted and have the same ending number in the first field, not that it should matter, just for explaining what is happening.

I have read on the forums about sorting nulmerically vs lexicographically (alphabetical). The latter doesn't work, so what am I missing? Here are subsets of each file:

file1:

7046 150
7047 150
7048 150
7049 150
7050 150
7051 150
7052 150
7053 150
7054 150
7055 333
7056 333
.
.
.
140876 543
file 2:


7046 2003-04
7047 2003-04
7048 2003-04
7049 2003-04
7050 2003-04
7051 2003-04
7052 2003-04
7053 2003-04
7054 2003-04
7055 2003-04
7056 2003-04
.
.
.
140876 2012-09

file 3: Misses all of the above, starts with 992, ends with 9998

This has to have something to do with the sort order, or there are too many rows, or.....?

Thank you.

[jviotti]

try

cat file1 file2 > file3