Grep or Cat Cut Value Used in Subsequent Grep of Cat "criteria" Statement

[Jator]

Say I have a file with the following data

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Tina
Steve
Mary

I would like to be able to pull one record, say Name 2 'Steve'

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cat /pathtofile/name.txt | head -2 | tail  -1

And use 'Steve' in a subsequent extraction from the following data:

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Steve	12
Mary	14
Tina		18

The code I imagine would look something like this, but not sure what goes within the "?" section of the code (or do you have to somehow assign Steve to a value that is referenced in a subsequent search? Tried Googling various questions to find a solution but couldn't find anything, hence asking the community.

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cat /pathtofile/name.txt | head -2 | tail  -1 | cat/pathtofile/records.txt | grep "?"

TIA

[rene]

For a good answer the problem needs a more functional specification. I.e., as to the "-2" thing it would seem you know you are looking for Steve, so why not grep Steve data.txt? Is the issue that the data file might contain more or other names but you need all from name.txt? Then something like for NAME in $(cat name.txt); do grep "$NAME" data.txt; done. Are the name.txt and data.txt file guaranteed to have the same names even if in possibly different order? If so, sort is going to be part of the best answer.

I.e., needs more info...

[Jator]

Thanks for the response. I'm pulling info from an html file, and the order (and perhaps names) will change on occasion, thus why I wanted to use the first grep results to then search in the second string from a different data source.

I'm creating a dashboard in conky and using behind the scene scripts to create a file to "pull" the data from in order. Thus on Monday, the order of results may be "Mary > Bill > Frank > Tina) and then on Tuesday it may be {Tina > Ahmed > Tarsha > Bill). If I am showing say the top 3, I was using the head -? | tail -1 to pull individual records to display.

I have the structure in place through separate scripts, but if I can have the grep result from the first file be used in the grep criteria in the second, I can collapse the number of steps that have to be done.

Hope that helps give more context.

[rene]

I'm still not completely clear on what's in the end the idea. For your example data file

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$ cat data.txt 
Steve	12
Mary	14
Tina	18

it seems that Tina > Mary > Steve, right? I.e., I suppose that's the "score" file and I suppose the idea is to display them in that order. So why is not simply sorting the data file by the score the answer? (edit: and/or limiting display to the first three lines of that result if the issue is that the data file contains more; stick a | head -3 after the sort). That is,

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$ sort -k2 -r data.txt 
Tina	18
Mary	14
Steve	12

or if without the scores themselves,

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$ sort -k2 -r data.txt | cut -f1
Tina
Mary
Steve

or if e.g. on one line,

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$ sort -k2 -r data.txt | cut -f1 | xargs
Tina Mary Steve

or....

Well, endless possibilities. If sort is not the answer then I still don't get it (enough); don't see where/how the separate name.txt comes into things.

[FreedomTruth]

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cat /pathtofile/name.txt | head -2 | tail  -1 | cat/pathtofile/records.txt | grep "?"

grep $(readline 2 name.txt) records.txt

or, if you really like head and tail,
grep $(cat name.txt | head -2 | tail -1) records.txt