How can I make awk not use scientific notation when printing small values?

Question

In the following awk command

 awk '{sum+=$1; ++n} END {avg=sum/n; print "Avg monitoring time = "avg}' file.txt 

what should I change to remove scientific notation output (very small values displayed as 1.5e-05) ?

I was not able to succeed with the OMFT variable.

Answer 1

You should use the printf AWK statement. That way you can specify padding, precision, etc. In your case, the %f control letter seems the more appropriate.

Answer 2

I was not able to succeed with the OMFT variable.

It is actually OFMT (outputformat), so for example:

awk 'BEGIN{OFMT="%f";print 0.000015}' 

will output:

0.000015 

as opposed to:

awk 'BEGIN{print 0.000015}' 

which output:

1.5e-05 

GNU AWK manual says that if you want to be POSIX-compliant it should be floating-point conversion specification.