exponent

Warning!

The use of gawkisms will prevent the script from running correctly on systems that use a traditional awk interpreter.

The doublestar exponent operator is not available in traditional implementations

• Traditional awk implementations do not provide an exponent arithmetic operator. The [[doublestar?]] symbol used here for arithmetic exponential operations is a gawkism and will not work in traditional awk.

The doublestar gawkism

• The [[doublestar?]] gawkism acts as a dyadic exponent operator. It returns the [[value?]] given as a left [[operand?]] to the power of the right [[operand?]]. The [[operand?]]s can be [[floating_poin?]]t values, producing a [[floating_point?]] value:

print (4 ** 3)    # 64 (4 to the power of 3)

Precedence

• The exponent operator gawkism has a higher precedence than all other arithmetic operators:

print (2 * 4 ** 3)    # 128 the exponent has a higher precedence than multiplication

Exponent Combination Assignment Operator

• The exponent [[combination_assignment_operator?]] gawkism represented by a [[starstarequals?]] trigraph, can also be used to perform an exponent calculation:

value **= 3    # value = value ** 3