Question

If I’m not mistaken, awk parses a number depending on the OS language (eg,echo "1,2" | awk '{printf("%f\n",$1)}' would be interpreted as 1 in an english system and as 1.2 in a system where a comma separates the integer from the decimal part).

I don’t know if the C printf does this too, so I added the C tag.

I would like to modify the previous command so that it returns the same value (1.2) regardless of the system being used.

Answer 1

Welcome to the ugliness of locale. To fix your problem, first set the locale to the C one.

export LC_NUMERIC=C
echo "1,2" | awk '...your code...'

To turn off other locale-dependent tomfoolery, you can

export LC_ALL=C