hello all,
I'm trying to do a calculation of the following all simple in itself but with the inclusion of something like significant figures. eg:

i want to do something like 10-1 = 09 and not 9
what i do at the moment is
x=10

y=$(($x-1))

that comes to 9 but i'm looking for 09 as the answer. and i know if you can set sig fig's to 2. then i should get the answer 09. The only other way i can think of doing it would be to read in the variable "x" count the number of characters in the variable and if its only one character add a 0 at the begining as i'm only using numbers from 01-99

Any ideas welcome thanks a ton
Markles

You can add 100 to the number and then get only the last two characters, e.g.

This is the way I do it in /bin/sh. I think there is a better way to write this piece of code in /bin/bash.

wow LoL what a simple and yet brilliant idea hehe, now i wish i'd thought of that. Thanks dude thats cool. Yeah i can write that fine in bash No Probs. But if there is a tool that does it properly if anyone knows then let me know cos i'll still be interested. But thanks to that person above

printf "%02d\n" $(( 10 - 1 ))
printf "%02d\n" $(( $x - 1 ))

cheers again hit the target right on the noggin. Thanks again i dont know what that thing is "printf" but sure am going to look into it looks like i might be able to use it in some other places as well so thanks very much peeps

see told you it was simple. but its only simple to those who are in the know

Well, glance through POSIX. Glance through GNU coreutils list (even better - POSIX is theory, coreutils are practice). Until you do it you miss a lot when bash scripting.

thanks but erm as bad as it might be to say this, what is posix and the other thing, i'm guessing some sort of documentation or "man" entries?? sorry am near to being a newb after all.

info coreutils
will do...

Being nearly newbie while aiming to learn is nothing to be sorry for. If you never used 'info', it's hard to guess...

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm
POSIX standard (one of revisions). Found by Snap for word POSIX.

thanks i will be looking at it

Well, if you haven't already, I highly recommend you bookmark & read these 2 links:
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/