Why awk script does not work on Mac OS but works on Linux?

macos awk filtering
degopwn picture degopwn · Jun 20, 2014 · Viewed 26.5k times · Source

I have this awk script that I use to filter genes that are differentially expressed. I have a csv file that was created in R.

 #Command to get DE genes
awk -F '\t' '$14 < 0.05 && $10 < -1 && $7 > 1 { print > "Genes-Down.csv" }
             $14 < 0.05 && $10 > +1 && $8 > 1 { print > "Genes-Up.csv" }' Results-RPKMs.csv

I started doing all my analyses on Mac OS now and the same command does not work. It also does not give any error message. It runs and nothing happens. I also had same problems with other sed commands, but it was easy to make new ones using awk.

Update: The MacOS X awk is version 20070501. However, the Ubuntu machine has mawk 1.3.3. The command awk --version wouldn't work. Had to use awk -W --version. So I think that is why it works on Ubuntu but was not working in MacOSX. So I downloaded mawk and installed it using fink and now the command works in MacOSX. Thanks for your help.

Update2: Actually the problem was not awk. Usually I create the csv files in R. Then I just run the script to do the filtering. Turns out that if I open the csv files in Excel or save an Excel file in csv format then the script does not work (tried several times with different delimiters). Apparently if you save a spreadsheet as .csv in MacOX (Excel 2011) and try to open it back in Excel it says that it is a SYLK file. There is a description of this on Microsoft website. If I use OpenOffice, it works just fine.

Answer

vikas027 picture vikas027 · Sep 19, 2016

I also had the same problem. Installing gawk on OSX 10.11.2 through brew solved my issue.

~$ brew install gawk
~$ gawk --version | head -n 1
GNU Awk 4.1.4, API: 1.1 (GNU MPFR 3.1.4-p1, GNU MP 6.1.1)
~$

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