awk - Finding common value across multiple files containing single column values

Question

I have 100 text files containing single columns each. The files are like:

file1.txt
10032
19873
18326

file2.txt
10032
19873
11254

file3.txt
15478
10032
11254

and so on. The size of each file is different. Kindly tell me how to find the numbers which are common in all these 100 files.

The same number appear only once in 1 file.

Answer 1

This will work whether or not the same number can appear multiple times in 1 file:

$ awk '{a[$0][ARGIND]} END{for (i in a) if (length(a[i])==ARGIND) print i}' file[123]
10032

The above uses GNU awk for true multi-dimensional arrays and ARGIND. There's easy tweaks for other awks if necessary, e.g.:

$ awk '!seen[$0,FILENAME]++{a[$0]++} END{for (i in a) if (a[i]==ARGC-1) print i}' file[123]
10032

If the numbers are unique in each file then all you need is:

$ awk '(++c[$0])==(ARGC-1)' file*
10032