from the desk of stinkpot

perform floating point calculations in bash

May 1st, 2007 by Lawrence David

turns out floating point division (or any other type of floating point math) isn’t built-into the bash shell.  instead, you’ll have to use the bc utility:

echo “6.0/10″ | bc -l

Posted in Shell Scripting | 3 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

3 Responses to “perform floating point calculations in bash”

1. on 07 Jun 2007 at 4:47 pm   Forrest

   echo ’4*a(1)’ | bc -l

2. on 10 May 2011 at 5:17 am   mcb

   Thanks, it is working

   $ echo ’4*a(1)’ | bc -l
   3.14159265358979323844
   $

3. on 25 Nov 2011 at 7:30 am   Vinod

   Thanks you so much. Was delighted after seeing this.

   Thanks you Jesus