Re: Problem with join

[Jim Meyering]

"Slawek Zak" <address@hidden> wrote:
> It seems to me that EMPTY field printing in join is borked, or I am misguided.
>
> Here is a minimal example:
>
> join -e EMPTY -o "1.1 1.2 2.2" /tmp/a /dev/null
>
> /tmp/a being single line: "b 2"
>
> I think that the output should be "b 2 EMPTY" not none like it is with
> included in coreutils 6.9.

There are no input lines in your FILE2 (/dev/null),
so that use of join must not print anything.

Perhaps you want the -a1 option, to make it print a line
for each unpairable line in FILE1:

    $ join -a1 -e EMPTY -o "1.1 1.2 2.2" a /dev/null
    b 2 EMPTY