gawk works from command line but not from cron

fantasygoat · 06-05-2010, 11:39 AM

I have a very simple gawk script to add commas to numbers to make them more readable:

total=`echo "$total" | /bin/gawk '{ printf "%'"'"'d", $1 }'`

It works perfectly from the command line, but when run from cron it doesn't add the commas.

Any ideas?

colucix · 06-05-2010, 03:04 PM

The %'d format works only for locales that support this features. Usually crontab does not set the environment variable LANG and the crontab's locale is POSIX. Try to set

Code:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

at the beginning of the shell script or in the crontab entry itself (obviously en_US.UTF-8 is just an example, you'd choose your actual locale):

Code:

0 22 * * * LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /path/to/scheduled/script

or even immediately before the gawk command:

Code:

total=`echo "$total" | LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /bin/gawk '{ printf "%'"'"'d", $1 }'`

Edit: an aside note: maybe you don't really nedit awk to do the job, since even the printf command supports the %'d format:

Code:

total=$(env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 printf "%'d" $total)

Hope this helps.

fantasygoat · 06-05-2010, 06:02 PM

Perfect, exactly the info I was looking for!

s_mk · 10-25-2011, 01:18 PM

Ugh, 3 days trying to find an answer to this one. Ur a rockstar man.

One note on ur post tho... it was printf that was skipping the thousands separator.

Nevertheless, it's the same issue. After I added LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to the top of the script it worked as expected. --jic someone else doesn't see this as a likely solution for most locale formatting issues.