Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,
I've had a look at the printf modifiers, but so far I haven't had much luck in making it do what I need.
I need to make it output with a set number of characters every time: whether it's by adding zeros at the end or by rounding, the output has to have the same number of characters in it, for example 6.
If it reads 10.1, 1, 0.1 and 0.01, the outputs would have to be 10.100 (the period counts), 1.0000, 0.1000 and 0.0100.
Is there a flag to do this?

You can specify the number of places after the decimal point, but not the number of digits in general.

What I'd do is print it to more decimal places than you need into a variable, then substr() the variable to get the number of characters you want.

Code:

$ echo "10.3" | awk '{ V=sprintf("%.10f", $1); $1=substr(V, 0, 6); } 1'
10.300

$

Of course, that means you may end up with numbers like "10000." And if your number starts being so large the decimal point isn't included in the substr, the trick will no longer work.

Also: floating point numbers are not infinite-precision. If you look to enough decimal places you may find minute imprecision in the results of arithmetic.

It's ok, it's not really necessary, it was mostly for cosmetic reasons. Thanks anyway!