That's really pesky. You can avoid the scientific format with printf but if the line numbers exceed the capacity of the data type used internally by awk for integers, the output will be bogus.

Code:

borkstation$ awk 'END { print 123456789123456 }' /dev/null
1.23457e+14
borkstation$ awk 'END { printf "%i\n", 123456789123456 }' /dev/null
2147483647
borkstation$ perl -le 'print 123456789123456'
123456789123456

So the only workaround I can suggest is to switch to Perl in order to solve this. There is a script a2p in the Perl distribution which can convert awk scripts to Perl scripts, although I hear it's not perfect.

I'm sorry, I can't find a question in that. Can you rephrase?

The scripts seem to be different for each file, so it seems a bit dubious. Certainly you could try to refactor the code to reduce duplication. It seems hard to write an awk script which could decide which fields to select purely based on the looks of the input (remember, file names are not visible when you receive data from a pipe), but if you know how to do that, by all means give it a try. Perhaps you could marshal the output from gzcat into a form where you can also include headers with information about which field numbers to use, or something. (Think XML format, although you don't have to use the specifics of XML, of course. Something simple like a prefix on each line which says which fields to look at is probably a lot easier to code and understand.)

Group the commands into a subshell and pipe the output from that shell to sort.

Code:

( awk one; awk too; awk some more ) | sort

sort uses temporary files if the inputs are big.