Shell Programming and Scripting

It sounds so easy to do.

I have a file thats laid out like this..


number text text text text (etc about 15 times with various text fields)

I want to take the first field, "number", subtract 100 from it, and then put it back in the file. a simple little manipulation of the first field in the file.

is there an easy way to do this?

So if it looks like


14523 a b c d e f
24245 g h i j k l

it would end up being

14423 a b c d e f
24145 g h i j k

Code:

 awk '{ $1=$1-100; print $0} ' filename

Well that pretty much worked..

One thing though, why does it convert everything to scientific form?

When I do a manipulation on large numbers the results look something like this:

1.12649e+09

Ideas?

Yes. $1 was a string on input - it got run thru a math operation so now it's a number.
Let's try to force it back to a string.

Code:

awk '{ $1=$1-100; $1=sprintf("%s", $1); print $0} ' filename

Revised:

Code:

awk '{ $1=sprintf("%s", $1-100); print}' filename