Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Octal and Hexadecimal Constants in gawk

gawk allows you to use octal and hexadecimal constants in your program source code. The form is as in C: octal constants start with a leading 0, and hexadecimal constants with a leading 0x or 0X. The hexadecimal digits a–f may be in either uppercase or lowercase.

$ gawk 'BEGIN { print 042, 42, 0x42 }'
    34 42 66

Use the strtonum( ) function to convert octal or hexadecimal input data into numerical values.