Hi,

I have problems with awk. Basically, as soon as I use some mathematical expression I lose all but 1 or 2 significant digits. The problem does not occur on a different machine (which runs Mandrake 9.x), and installing the latest version of awk did not help. It really seems to be due to my particular settings.

I am running awk 3.1.4 on Mandrake 10.1

Here is an example of the behaviour of awk. The input file is

+0.000000E+00 -2.517389E-10^M +0.000000E+00 +9.685495E-01
+1.000000E-03 +8.594784E-09^M +1.000000E-03 +9.689896E-01
+2.000000E-03 +1.751617E-08^M +2.000000E-03 +9.641005E-01
+3.000000E-03 +2.649998E-08^M +3.000000E-03 +9.645113E-01
+4.000000E-03 +3.565420E-08^M +4.000000E-03 +9.702466E-01

I now execute

awk '{print $1, $2, $4*1e-2}'

and the output is

+0.000000E+00 -2.517389E-10^M 0,09
+1.000000E-03 +8.594784E-09^M 0,09
+2.000000E-03 +1.751617E-08^M 0,09
+3.000000E-03 +2.649998E-08^M 0,09
+4.000000E-03 +3.565420E-08^M 0,09

As you can see, the first digit (9) is good, but the order of magnitude is wrong and all other digits have been lost. Different mathematical expressions yield similar results, for example

awk '{print $1, $2, $4+$4}'

will output

+0.000000E+00 -2.517389E-10^M 18
+1.000000E-03 +8.594784E-09^M 18
+2.000000E-03 +1.751617E-08^M 18
+3.000000E-03 +2.649998E-08^M 18
+4.000000E-03 +3.565420E-08^M 18

Again, we only keep 9+9=18, everything after the decimal place is gone.

A problem might be that my system is set-up in french, although it usually take the dot as the decimal place separator, the comma is the official one. However, I do not know how to change these settings in awk.

Thanks for your help.

My guess is that awk would take settings from your current locale with respect to the ./, issue, which may well be your problem.

I concur. With LC_ALL="sv_SE" I got the same erroneous output.
After setting 'export LC_ALL=en' I got :

+0.000000E+00 -2.517389E-10^M 0.0096855
+1.000000E-03 +8.594784E-09^M 0.0096899
+2.000000E-03 +1.751617E-08^M 0.00964101
+3.000000E-03 +2.649998E-08^M 0.00964511
+4.000000E-03 +3.565420E-08^M 0.00970247

- Peder

Fyi, you can always use "tr ',' '.'" in there to translate if you don't want to mess with locales. (This assumes, of course, that all commas are decimals, and that no other dots are in use.)

awk itself uses commas, so using "tr ',' '.'" might cause other problems.

However, changing the locale to english works fine. Thanks a lot!!