How to subtract a constant number from a column

Question

Is there a way to subtract the smallest value from all the values of a column? I need to subtract the first number in the 1st column from all other numbers in the first column.

I wrote this script, but it's not giving the right result:

$ awk '{$1 = $1 - 1280449530}' file  1280449530 452 1280449531 2434 1280449531 2681 1280449531 2946 1280449531 1626 1280449532 3217 1280449532 4764 1280449532 4501 1280449532 3372 1280449533 4129 1280449533 6937 1280449533 6423 1280449533 4818 1280449534 4850 1280449534 8980 1280449534 8078 1280449534 6788 1280449535 5587 1280449535 10879 1280449535 9920 1280449535 8146 1280449536 6324 1280449536 12860 1280449536 11612 

Answer 1

What you have essentially works, you're just not outputting it. This will output what you want:

awk '{print ($1 - 1280449530) " " $2}' file 

You can also be slightly cleverer and not hardcode the shift amount:

awk '{        if(NR == 1) {            shift = $1        }         print ($1 - shift) " " $2 }' file