Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi I am posting here for the first time. I am trying to write a script that reads a data file and tries to determine if any absolute values that are above 0.5

I was thinking it ought to be possible to do this with awk somehow. Are there any suggestions before I start reinventing the wheel?

Here is an example of the data from the file.

0.0000000 0.4984217 0.3092685 -0.1302824 -0.3685155

Code:

awk ' function abs(val) {return (val < 0 ) ? val *-1: val }
      { if (abs($3) >= .5) { print $0}; next } ' inputfile

You can add code for $1 $2 etc for each field in your file.

Code:

cat urfile |xargs -n1 |awk '$1>0.5'

or

awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {if ($i>0.5) {print $i}}}' urfile

The OP wants the equivalent of the abs() function

Thanks Jim, I update the code with your awk abs function.

Code:

$ awk 'function abs(val) {return val>0?val:-val }
{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {if (abs($i)>0.3) {print $i}}}' urfile
0.4984217
0.3092685
-0.3685155

I change the 0.5 to 0.3 to confirm the script is correct, otherwise no output.