Convert a numeric to 2 decimal point value

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi , I have a file which contains text like

A|Mau|Code|12|Detail
B|Mau|Code|20|Header

I want to write a command using awk which will output

A|Mau|Code|12.00|Detail
B|Mau|Code|20.00|Header

I used a command like

awk -F"|" {printf "%s|%s|%s|%.2f|%s",$1,$2,$3,$4,$5}'

which does the job but could have been better.

any suggestions?

2

Perhaps

awk -F"|" -v OFS="|" '{ $4=sprintf("%.2f",$4); } 1'
1 Like
3

Your approach needs two small corrections to print the desired output:

awk -F"|" '{printf "%s|%s|%s|%.2f|%s\n",$1,$2,$3,$4,$5}' file

A wee bit shorter would be

$ awk -F\| '$4+=1e-4' CONVFMT="%.2f" OFS="|" file
A|Mau|Code|12.00|Detail
B|Mau|Code|20.00|Header

(will fail on $4 == 0.0001, though)

4

Can you please explain what does "1" at the end does? I can see that i dont need to write print $0 to print the complete line

5

awk works on pattern {action} pairs in a way that it evaluates the pattern, and, if TRUE, executes the action.

man awk :

So - as 1 represents TRUE, awk executes the default action print .