Hi,
I am a newbie to gawk and I really don't know how to do this... I have a file with several columns of numbers and I want to make operations with some of the values...
cat file.dat | gawk -v NAME=2 '/AS/ {TIME=$4} $1==NAME {print TIME,($3*1)}'
The result of multiplying the field 3 by one yields zero, which is obviously wrong
I have tried with $3 = $3 * 1 and all possible combinations of brackets... why is it yielding zero??
thanks
this works for me:
awk --version
GNU Awk 3.1.4
echo "1 2 3" | awk '{ print "mult=" $3*$2 }'
the result is zero because somehow your system sees a string instead of a number. I admit i do not see why. (asuming you have TESTED that $3 realy is a number).
damn!!
Not, this gave me the same... but I have figured out the problem... the locales, man, I was employing my locales (Catalan) and all dots were substituted with commas and thus gawk could not do anything and the result of any operation was zero 
So don't forget to do
LANG=C LC_ALL=C
export LANG LC_ALL
before you start gawking around