My blog_title_here

AWK script to convert long integers to human-readable number format and back

Haven't found anything good for this on the internet before, and it's often useful in various shell scripts where metrics or tunable numbers can get rather long:

3400000000 -> 3_400M
500000 -> 500K
8123455009 -> 8_123_455_009

That is, to replace long stretches of zeroes with short Kilo/Mega/Giga/etc suffixes and separate the usual 3-digit groups by something (underscore being programming-language-friendly and hard to mistake for field separator), and also convert those back to pure integers from cli arguments and such.

There's numfmt in GNU coreutils, but that'd be missing on Alpine, typical network devices, other busybox Linux distros, *BSD, MacOS, etc, and it doesn't have "match/convert all numbers you want" mode anyway.

So alternative is using something that is available everywhere, like generic AWK, with a reasonably short scripts to implement that number-mangling logic.

• Human-format all space-separated long numbers in stdin, like in example above:

  awk '{n=0; while (n++ <= NR) { m=0
    while (match($n,/^[0-9]+[0-9]{3}$/) && m < 5) {
      k=length($n)-3
      if (substr($n,k+1)=="000") { $n=substr($n,1,k); m++ }
      else while (match($n,/[0-9]{4}(_|$)/))
        $n = substr($n,1,RSTART) "_" substr($n,RSTART+1) }
    $n = $n substr("KMGTP", m, m ? 1 : 0) }; print}'
  

• Find all human-formatted numbers in stdin and convert them back to long integers:

  awk '{while (n++ <= NR) {if (match($n,/^([0-9]+_)*[0-9]+[KMGTP]?$/)) {
    sub("_","",$n); if (m=index("KMGTP", substr($n,length($n),1))) {
      $n=substr($n,1,length($n)-1); while (m-- > 0) $n=$n "000" } }}; print}'
  

  I.e. reverse of the operation above.

Code is somewhat compressed for brevity within scripts where it's not the point. It should work with any existing AWK implementations afaik (gawk, nawk, busybox awk, etc), and not touch any fields that don't need such conversion (as filtered by the first regexp there).

Line-match pattern can be added at the start to limit conversion to lines with specific fields (e.g. match($1,/(Count|Threshold|Limit|Total):/) {...}), "n" bounds and $n regexps adjusted to filter-out some inline values.

Numbers here will use SI prefixes, not 2^10 binary-ish increments, like in IEC units (kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, etc), as is more useful in general, but substr() and "000"-extension can be replaced by /1024 (and extra -iB unit suffix) when working with byte values - AWK can do basic arithmetic just fine too.

Took me couple times misreading and mistyping overly long integers from/into scripts to realize that this is important enough and should be done better than counting zeroes with arrow keys like some tech-barbarian, even in simple bash scripts, and hopefully this hack might eventually pop-up in search for someone else coming to that conclusion as well.