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Asked: 2026-06-06T12:39:14+00:00

I need to do some pretty formatting of numbers with bash. I have a

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I need to do some “pretty” formatting of numbers with bash. I have a string of comma separated floating point numbers in scientific format (ie. either 3.14159 or 1.0601e-12) and I need to create a comma separated list where all numbers have as many characters. It isn’t very important whether spaces or zeros are used for filling (ie. ‘ 3.14’ and ‘3.140000’ both work). I tried using printf with “%.12f”, but that of course won’t work. I’m out of ideas (except for working on a character level, but that seems overly complicated)

I really appreciate the help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you just want to specify a constant number of characters in your output, you can use the field-width modifier. For example, to ensure each field has exactly 24 characters:

    printf "%'24f\n" 3.140000 3000
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