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Stuff I did not know about… POSIX join command

One of the comments to last week’s scribble on joins referred to the POSIX join command. What does this mean? There is a commandline tool called ‘join’ available on most Unix-ish boxes, including Linux and OS X. From my own Mac (“man 1 join”):

NAME
join — relational database operator

SYNOPSIS
join [-a file_number | -v file_number] [-e string] [-o list] [-t char]
[-1 field] [-2 field] file1 file2

The commenter also mentions this article which explores the command some more with examples.

It’s not MySQL, but it looks very useful. Not all data should be in a db, sometimes a textfile is perfectly sensible, and sometimes you just need an operator like this. And it already exists. Coolness.

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