Hi iam new to shell programming. I have Elx Linux installed. I have to do floating point arthimetic but the bc command doesn't seem to work. Is there any alternate way to do this. i have checked man bc but it says there is no manual on that . i think there is no bc installed in the linux



Pls help

Sharad

EIX looks to be an RPM-based distribution. You can download a source RPM for bc from www.rpmfind.net, and compile it with You can then install the generated RPM file (which I think goes somewhere like /usr/share/RPM/build/RPM/i386/bc-something.rpm) using You will need to run both commands as root

try with bc -l

I find it very usefull to write small C programs to be included in a shell script. There are things you do much more easliy with a standandard language than by learning each time all the options of a utility like bc (which somebody else has written in C some times before). for exemple, do_arith.c

#include <stdio.h>
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
double x,y;
sscanf(argv[1],"%lf",&x);
sscanf(argv[2],"%lf",&y);
return(x+y);
}

compile it
gcc -o do_arith do_arith.c


and now, if in your shell script you want to add 23.4 and 44.2, just use

do_arith 23.4 44.2


Of course, if what you wan't to do is much more complicated than that, you should use bc or the like. Very often however, writing a small piece is faster than fishing the RPM, installing it, learning the synthax and so on.

regards billy

Or using 'dc' which is the back-end to bc

using precision of 12: