awkmawk

Float comparison in awk and mawk

I cannot understand why the float number comparison does not work in mawk:

mawk '$3 > 10' file.txt
[...]
9_6_F-repl      24834   38.8699
9_6_F   56523   17.9344
9_7_F   3196    3.68367
9_9_F   2278    2.37445
9_annua_M-merg  122663  163.557
9_huetii_F-merg 208077  172.775
[...]

While it does perfectly on awk like that:

awk '{if ($3 > 10) print $1}' file.txt

I'm obviously doing something wrong here, but I cannot understand what.

Solution

  • It fails if the file has CRLF line terminators. Remove the \r first:

    $ file foo
foo: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
$ mawk 'sub(/\r/,"") && ($3 > 10)'  foo
9_6_F-repl      24834   38.8699
9_6_F   56523   17.9344
9_annua_M-merg  122663  163.557
9_huetii_F-merg 208077  172.775

    Alternatively you could use dos2unix or such.

    EDIT2: If you are using locale that has comma as decimal separator, it affects float comparisons in mawk.

    In this case you can either:

    1) set locale to

    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

    or

    2) change decimal separators to commas and pipe it to mawk:

    mawk '$3 > 10' <(cat file.txt | sed -e "s/\./,/")