[vox-tech] BASH: ignore space in for loop

[Ken Herron]

Dylan Beaudette wrote:

> The "Name of place" values often have spaces in them, which seems to be 
> confusing a for loop in bash:
> 
> running:
> for this_quadname in `cat file_a`; do echo grep -i "$this_quadname" file_b ; 
> done 

     while read pattern
     do
         grep -i "$pattern" file_b
     done < file_a

or

     cat file_a | while read pattern
     do
         grep -i "$pattern" file_b
     done


> PS I am merely trying to implement a simple many-to-one join on 2 text files 
> based on a common key, which is the first column in each file... however the 
> spaces in the keys are messing up the conventional 'join' program...

You should be able to specify the field separator using join's -t 
option...?