I have looked everywhere.
Does bash have a money/currency format for output?

Do I have to use awk or printf?
Thank you

You can use both:

# var=52.5259
# printf "$%.2f\n" $var
$52.53
# echo $var | awk '{printf "$%.2f\n",$1}'
$52.53

From sed one liners

# add commas to numeric strings, changing "1234567" to "1,234,567"
 gsed ':a;s/\B[0-9]\{3\}\>/,&/;ta'                     # GNU sed
 sed -e :a -e 's/\(.*[0-9]\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1,\2/;ta'  # other seds

 # add commas to numbers with decimal points and minus signs (GNU sed)
 gsed -r ':a;s/(^|[^0-9.])([0-9]+)([0-9]{3})/\1\2,\3/g;ta'

Another way to print the thousands separator is to use the printf ' format flag. For example

$ var=123456.78
$ printf "$%'.2f\n" $var
$ $123,456.78

To my knowledge there's no currency routine or built-in in the bash shell, but you could write a function to take care of it. Also, if this helps, check out this manage for units. It deals mostly with conversion of things like yards and feet, but has some interesting stuff in the middle regarding currency.
www.computerseo.com