Padding zeros in a string

Question

I\'m writing a bash script to get some podcasts. The problem is that some of the podcast numbers are one digits while others are two/three digits, therefore I need to pad t

Answer 1

Attention though if your input string has a leading zero!
printf will still do the padding, but also convert your string to hex octal format.

# looks ok
$ echo `printf "%05d" 03`
00003

# but not for numbers over 8
$ echo `printf "%05d" 033`
00027

A solution to this seems to be printing a float instead of decimal.
The trick is omitting the decimal places with .0f.

# works with leading zero
$ echo `printf "%05.0f" 033`
00033

# as well as without
$ echo `printf "%05.0f" 33`
00033