looping in awk
 

I need awk to work with two files, read a single column from file1, and taking each value, search for that value in file2.

I guess I need perhaps two forms of "while" loops, one within the other, but cannot get anything to work.

Could anyone give me a simple example to build on?

file1 is created by another process and could have 10 or 20 "codes" that I want to search for in file2 at a fixed position e.g. substr($3,5,4).

Heres hoping someone has done this....

check out the comm utility first. man comm

Thanks, but that doesn't do it for me. What I am trying to do is look through a file(file1) and for each entry in the single column found there, go through the second file locating that entry at a set column position, and if found read value in another column.
The exercise is aimed at producing an output which will be an analysis of the values found by reference to the codes.

This looks for the presence of column starting at 10 ending at 14 and exists anywhere
in file2.