print
When you use the print statement to print numeric values,
awk internally converts the number to a string of characters,
and prints that string. awk uses the sprintf function
to do this conversion
(see section Built-in Functions for String Manipulation).
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
section Format-Control Letters.
The built-in variable OFMT contains the default 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".
By supplying different format specifications
as the value of OFMT, you can change how print will print
your numbers. As a brief example:
$ awk 'BEGIN {
> OFMT = "%.0f" # print numbers as integers (rounds)
> print 17.23 }'
-| 17
According to the POSIX standard, awk's behavior will be undefined
if OFMT contains anything but a floating point conversion specification
(d.c.).
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