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Comment by darrenf | Hacker News Reader

Why even use awk rather than the shell's (well, bash's) builtin printf?

    $ printf '%d\n' "0005"
    5

That might not always do what a naïve user expects:

    $ printf '%d\n' "0025"
    21

You can apply the awk command on a pipe, and so it is applies on each line of the file/stream.

Right - though that's solvable with xargs:

    $ echo "0005" | xargs printf '%d\n'
    5

That said, my suggestion doesn't work anyway since the leading 0 marks it as octal, d'oh (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread).