Shell Programming and Scripting

Is there a function in awk to get the absolute value of a-b which can be negative or positive, I just care for the absolute value...

echo '-12' | nawk '{ print ($1 >= 0) ? $1 : 0 - $1}'

Thanks 80)

Thanks vgersh99, it works for me too!

Hi vgersh99,

I saw this post and I wonder if I have an associative array for calculate an operation; how abs would work in this case.

Assume;

I have
count[$1]=$2-$1;

If I apply the one you suggested in earlier post,

can it be turned to;

count[$1]= ($4-$5)*(0.05);
if(count[$1]>=0){
count[$1]=count[$1];}
else
count[$1]=0-count[$1];


Please advise. Really hope to hear from you soon! Thanks

-Jason

sure, why not!

Code:

   count[$1]= ($4-$5)*(0.05)
   if(count[$1]<0) count[$1]=0-count[$1]