UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello Everyone,

I've got a comma-delimited file that looks like this:

Code:

     0012,123  ,456  ,05/12/2014
     0123,525  ,286  ,05/12/2014
     0456,791  ,300  ,05/12/2014
     1095,759  ,300  ,05/12/2014
     1344,576  ,292  ,05/12/2014
     1558,551  ,283  ,05/12/2014
002183719,     ,     ,05/12/2014
     2552,816  ,300  ,05/12/2014

I want to remove the leading zeros in the first field only, but am not sure how to combine printf and print. Here's my code:

Code:

awk -F, '{printf "%d\n", $1}' file1

This strips the zeros but only reports field 1. I would like to report the other fields, too. Thanks in advance for your help.

Code:

 awk -F, '{$1+=0}1' OFS=, myFile

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately this didn't work for all the records. Some entries in field 1 came out like this:

Code:

8.80674e+06, ,295 ,05/12/2014

I should have mentioned that I'm using sh on hp-ux. Thank you!

So - where's the leading zeroes in field 1? Should you be unhappy with the scientific notation, add e.g. CONVFMT="%.0f" in front of the file name.

OK, fair enough that I am unfamiliar with the suggested output as scientific notation. But that's why I posted in this forum, and it's not helpful for me to have an answer that changes my number to something unusable.

So let's back up here -- what I really want to do is use printf to format field $1 and then also print the other fields as well. But I can't figure out how to change just field $1. Learning how to do this can be applied to other printf statements, so I'd appreciate the help.

Thank you.

could you provide a representative 'enough' sample of data - seems like we're dealing with more than just what was provided initially.

Let's look at field $1 in the sample file I provided. The maximum number of digits in this field is 9, although many entries are less than nine digits, and some begin with one or more leading zeros.

My goal is to format field $1 so I can sort the entire file in ascending numeric order by field $1. Maybe printf isn't the best method. Perhaps padding the field with leading zeroes would be an alternative answer. But then I'm in the same boat -- how do I combine the printf formatting with reporting the rest of the records for each line? Again, this may not be the best method. Thank you for your assistance.