CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellawk
facha
facha

Reputation: 12502

awk: print 0 instead of blank when no lines were processed

Consider this awk example that sums up all values of a particular field in a file:

awk '{sum+=$2} END{print "total: ",sum}' file.txt

When the file is empty awk won't output anything for sum. Is it possible to output '0' in those cases?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 66

Answers (1)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 203254

In order of my preference (most to least preferred) for this specific use-case:

awk '{sum+=$2} END{print "total: ",sum+0}' file.txt

or

awk '{sum+=$2} END{printf "total: %d\n",sum}' file.txt

or

awk 'BEGIN{sum=0} {sum+=$2} END{print "total: ",sum}' file.txt

Upvotes: 3

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