OFMT (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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5.4 Controlling Numeric Output with print
When printing numeric values with the print
statement, awk
internally converts each number to a string of characters and prints that string. awk
uses the sprintf()
function to do this conversion (see section String-Manipulation Functions). For now, it suffices to say that the sprintf()
function accepts a format specification that tells it how to format numbers (or strings), and that there are a number of different ways in which numbers can be formatted. The different format specifications are discussed more fully in Format-Control Letters.
The predefined variable OFMT
contains the format specification that print
uses with sprintf()
when it wants to convert a number to a string for printing. The default value of OFMT
is "%.6g"
. The way print
prints numbers can be changed by supplying a different format specification for the value of OFMT
, as shown in the following example:
$ awk 'BEGIN { > OFMT = "%.0f" # print numbers as integers (rounds) > print 17.23, 17.54 }' -| 17 18
According to the POSIX standard, awk
’s behavior is undefined
if OFMT
contains anything but a floating-point conversion specification.
(d.c.)