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Asked: 2026-05-28T04:22:08+00:00

I have a pipe delimited feed file which has several fields. Since I only

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I have a pipe delimited feed file which has several fields. Since I only need a few, I thought of using awk to capture them for my testing purposes. However, I noticed that printf changes the value if I use "%d". It works fine if I use "%s".

Feed File Sample:

[jaypal:~/Temp] cat temp

302610004125074|19769904399993903|30|15|2012-01-13 17:20:02.346000|2012-01-13 17:20:03.307000|E072AE4B|587244|316|13|GSM|1|SUCC|0|1|255|2|2|0|213|2|0|6|0|0|0|0|0|10|16473840051|30|302610|235|250|0|7|0|0|0|0|0|10|54320058002|906|722310|2|0||0|BELL MOBILITY CELLULAR, INC|BELL MOBILITY CELLULAR, INC|Bell Mobility|AMX ARGENTINA SA.|Claro aka CTI Movil|CAN|ARG|

I am interested in capturing the second column which is 19769904399993903.

Here are my tests:

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{printf ("%d\n",$2)}' temp
19769904399993904   # Value is changed

However, the following two tests works fine –

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{printf ("%s\n",$2)}' temp
19769904399993903   # Value remains same

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{print $2}' temp
19769904399993903   # Value remains same

So is this a limit of "%d" of not able to handle long integers. If thats the case why would it add one to the number instead of may be truncating it?

I have tried this with BSD and GNU versions of awk.

Version Info:

[jaypal:~/Temp] gawk --version
GNU Awk 4.0.0
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-2011 Free Software Foundation.

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk --version
awk version 20070501
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I believe the underlying numeric format in this case is an IEEE double. So the changed value is a result of floating point precision errors. If it is actually necessary to treat the large values as numerics and to maintain accurate precision, it might be better to use something like Perl, Ruby, or Python which have the capabilities (maybe via extensions) to handle arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

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