Printing long integers in awk

Question

I have a pipe delimited feed file which has several fields. Since I only need a few, I thought of using awk to capture them for my testing purposes. However, I noticed that printf changes the value if I use "%d". It works fine if I use "%s".

Feed File Sample:

[jaypal:~/Temp] cat temp

302610004125074|19769904399993903|30|15|2012-01-13 17:20:02.346000|2012-01-13 17:20:03.307000|E072AE4B|587244|316|13|GSM|1|SUCC|0|1|255|2|2|0|213|2|0|6|0|0|0|0|0|10|16473840051|30|302610|235|250|0|7|0|0|0|0|0|10|54320058002|906|722310|2|0||0|BELL MOBILITY CELLULAR, INC|BELL MOBILITY CELLULAR, INC|Bell Mobility|AMX ARGENTINA SA.|Claro aka CTI Movil|CAN|ARG|

I am interested in capturing the second column which is 19769904399993903.

Here are my tests:

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{printf ("%d
",$2)}' temp
19769904399993904   # Value is changed

However, the following two tests works fine -

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{printf ("%s
",$2)}' temp
19769904399993903   # Value remains same

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk -F"|" '{print $2}' temp
19769904399993903   # Value remains same

So is this a limit of "%d" of not able to handle long integers. If thats the case why would it add one to the number instead of may be truncating it?

I have tried this with BSD and GNU versions of awk.

Version Info:

[jaypal:~/Temp] gawk --version
GNU Awk 4.0.0
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-2011 Free Software Foundation.

[jaypal:~/Temp] awk --version
awk version 20070501

Answer 1

Starting with GNU awk 4.1 you can use --bignum or -M

$ awk 'BEGIN {print 19769904399993903}'
19769904399993904

$ awk --bignum 'BEGIN {print 19769904399993903}'
19769904399993903

§ Command-Line Options