I had to negate numbers in a data file. My initial script simply negated the required field. Here a test:
gawk "{ print -$1 }"
123
-123
123.45678
-123.457
I wanted to preserve all the digits after the decimal point so I tried printf() (the multiple double-quotes is to escape double-quotes in Windows CMD):
gawk "{ printf("""%10lf\n""", -$1) }"
123
-123.000000
123.45678
-123.456780
123.456
-123.456000
Hm, now the result was being padded to the right depending on the number of digits specified. Since I only wanted to negate the values and not do any arithmetic, a trick is to add or delete the leading minus sign from the input string depending whether the input value was positive or negative, respectively:
gawk "{ print $1<0 ? substr($1, 2) : """-""" $1 }"
123
-123
123.45678
-123.45678
-123
123
-123.45678
123.45678
