Sort – Lexicographically Sort One Column and Numerically Sort Another

The usual sort command doesn't provide an included way to specify your specific "dictionary", and while the grep command allows you to provide a file of regular expressions, it won't change the order of the output. But you can put both together in a simple foreach loop -- here's an example that works in the bash shell:

for i in `cat fileofregexp`; do grep "$i" myinputfile; done

This takes each regexp line from your file of regular expressions one by one, and outputs any match from your inputfile, so the resulting output will be sorted by your regexp order. Note that any lines in your inputfile that don't match at all will not make it to the output.

Addendum: As requested, here's a version using a while loop:

while IFS= read -r i; do grep "$i" myinputfile; done  < fileofregexp

You want -o auto:

join -t, -j 1 -a 1 -a 2 -o auto john jane

From man join:

-o FORMAT
       obey FORMAT while constructing output line

If FORMAT is the keyword 'auto', then the first line of  each  file  determines  the  number  of fields output for each line.

Or better explained from GNU Coreutils: join invocation:

‘-o auto’

If the keyword ‘auto’ is specified, infer the output format from the first line in each file. This is the same as the default output format but also ensures the same number of fields are output for each line. Missing fields are replaced with the -e option and extra fields are discarded.

% cat john 
apple,green
cherry,red
orange,orange
% cat jane 
apple,red
banana,yellow
cherry,yellow
kiwi,green
% join -t, -j 1 -a 1 -a 2 -o auto john jane
apple,green,red
banana,,yellow
cherry,red,yellow
kiwi,,green
orange,orange,