2

I have a simple file with some numerical values in it:

 2018-11-15 14:07:22      37.672     20.553        15.90   4.0 
 2018-11-17 09:15:46      37.519     20.692        13.80   4.0 
 2018-11-17 20:33:18      37.540     21.712         9.50   4.2 
 2018-11-18 05:18:02      37.391     20.516         0.00   4.3 
 2018-11-18 06:06:44      37.556     20.268         0.00   4.3 
 2018-11-19 05:56:51      37.565     20.678        14.60   4.2 
 2018-11-19 13:05:56      37.179     20.580         6.10   5.1 
 2018-11-19 16:16:41      37.167     20.571         0.10   4.0

I just want to print the third and the fourth column with one decimal. For that reason I do:

    awk '{printf "%.1f %.1f\n",$3,$4}' myfile

The problem in that it gives me the values with zeros in the decimal part (this output is just an example, it is not the output of the input):

37,0 20,0
37,0 20,0
40,0 28,0
34,0 26,0
40,0 20,0
34,0 26,0
34,0 26,0
39,0 24,0
37,0 20,0
39,0 24,0
36,0 21,0
37,0 20,0
37,0 20,0
37,0 20,0

I really don't know what is going on...

My locale is:

decimal_point=","
thousands_sep="."
grouping=-1;-1
numeric-decimal-point-wc=44
numeric-thousands-sep-wc=46
numeric-codeset="UTF-8"
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3
  • can you share locale -k LC_NUMERIC output? Commented Oct 25, 2021 at 12:06
  • 1
    Please update your example to show what output the given input actually results in. Commented Oct 25, 2021 at 12:36
  • Related: awk doesn't recognize field as a number Commented Oct 25, 2021 at 13:12

1 Answer 1

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3

As hinted in the comments, your locale defines the comma as the correct decimal separator, and that's what your awk seems to use.

The GNU awk documentation states that the standard requires doing that, but (like here), it's often considered more of a problem, so GNU awk doesn't do that by default, only in POSIX mode or if requested with the --use-lc-numeric option.

$ LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8 gawk '{printf "%.1f %.1f\n",$3,$4}' myfile |head -2
37.7 20.6
37.5 20.7

but

$ LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8 POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 gawk '{printf "%.1f %.1f\n",$3,$4}' myfile |head -2
37,0 20,0
37,0 20,0

Of course, your awk may have different customs, and the manual also mentions that older versions of GNU awk also complied with the standard here.

Check the documentation of the awk you're using, or just set LC_NUMERIC=C when running it to force the default locale.

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2
  • Thanks for the response. Using LC_NUMERIC=C solved my problem. However, do i have to do that every time i open the terminal ? Could i set the default forever ? Commented Oct 25, 2021 at 12:46
  • 1
    @fizzfish edit your .profile or .bash_profile or whatever shell startup file you use to add export LC_ALL=C. Commented Oct 25, 2021 at 16:14

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