awk without printing newline

awk '{sum+=$3}; END {printf "%f",sum/NR}' ${file}_${f}_v1.xls >> to-plot-p.xls

print will insert a newline by default. You dont want that to happen, hence use printf instead.

The ORS (output record separator) variable in AWK defaults to "\n" and is printed after every line. You can change it to " " in the BEGIN section if you want everything printed consecutively.

_{I guess many people are entering in this question looking for a way to avoid the new line in awk. Thus, I am going to offer a solution to just that, since the answer to the specific context was already solved!}

In awk, print automatically inserts a ORS after printing. ORS stands for "output record separator" and defaults to the new line. So whenever you say print "hi" awk prints "hi" + new line.

This can be changed in two different ways: using an empty ORS or using printf.

Using an empty ORS

awk -v ORS= '1' <<< "hello
man"

This returns "helloman", all together.

The problem here is that not all awks accept setting an empty ORS, so you probably have to set another record separator.

awk -v ORS="-" '{print ...}' file

For example:

awk -v ORS="-" '1' <<< "hello
man"

Returns "hello-man-".

Using printf (preferable)

While print attaches ORS after the record, printf does not. Thus, printf "hello" just prints "hello", nothing else.

$ awk 'BEGIN{print "hello"; print "bye"}'
hello
bye
$ awk 'BEGIN{printf "hello"; printf "bye"}'
hellobye

Finally, note that in general this misses a final new line, so that the shell prompt will be in the same line as the last line of the output. To clean this, use END {print ""} so a new line will be printed after all the processing.

$ seq 5 | awk '{printf "%s", $0}'
12345$
#    ^ prompt here

$ seq 5 | awk '{printf "%s", $0} END {print ""}'
12345