[ILUG] sprintf formatting question

[Phil]

Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
> 2008/8/20 Phil <philb at vodafone.ie>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I thought this one was obvious but seemingly not. I have a value, in excess
>> of 2^32 that I want to print out using perl (ancient RedHat 8.0 on 32 bit).
>> The output should be padded to 10 characters.
>>
>> First test works fine:
>> my $foo = 3188931580; # > 2147483648
>> print sprintf("%10u\n", $foo);
>>
>> Second test, fails due to overflow
>> my $foo = 5188931580; # > 4294967295
>> print sprintf("%10u\n", $foo);
>>
>> (actually prints out 4294967295)
>>
>>
>> My understanding was that a prefix of "L" or "ll" would indicate to sprintf
>> that the value is a "long long" so that any of the following should work:
>>
>> print sprintf("%10lld\n", $foo);        # Prints -1
>> print sprintf("%10llu\n", $foo);        # Print 4294967295
>> print sprintf("%10Ld\n", $foo);         # Prints -1
>> print sprintf("%10Lu\n", $foo);         # Prints 4294967295
>>
>> Have I misunderstood the sprintf syntax or is this a limitation of perl on
>> 32 bit?
>>


> RTFM :)
>    q, L or ll  interpret integer as C type "long long", "unsigned long long".
>                or "quads" (typically 64-bit integers)
> 
> The last will produce errors if Perl does not understand "quads" in
> your installation. 

Fair enough, I should have done that check explicitly.  Perl was able to 
correctly perform computations on the values though, so it seems the 
problem is limited to formatting with sprintf.

Thanks,
  -Phil