I have a text file, containing data in 3 columns like below: 0.0100000000 | 0.0058077299 | -0.0000000288 0.0110000000 | 0.0075128707 | -0.0000000373 0.0120000000 | 0.0093579693 | -0.0000000465 I want to get the variables from this file in gnuplot and use them to draw graphs: What I exactly do is like below (e.g: to pick the variable from row 2 column 3): ii= 2 a_0 = system("awk '{ if (NR == " . ii . ") printf \"%f\", $3}' " .datafile) a_0 = a_0+0. but what is written as a_0 is zero! How can I increase the precision to get the exact value?