This is an excellent article. I've been working (less than I'd like to admit) on learning Bash. I've observed that floating point arithmetic is amazingly difficult (Or i've missed something obvious) and dealing with dates that are not GNU formatted typically yields my writing embarrassing and nonsensical pipes into sed / awk.
Any pointers for doing floating point math and handling dates for newbs like me?
Hello @dsbarnes
,
You can not do floating point arithmetic natively in Bash, but there is a trick I use i.e. using the 'bc' command like:
echo "3.142 + 3.142" | bc -l # add the value of pi to itself
echo "sqrt(49)" | bc -l # find the square root of 49
echo "scale=2; sqrt(91)" | bc -l # To find the square root of 91 to just 2 decimal places.
The capabilities of bc is extremely wide. Check the Manpage for its full documentation.
Let me tell you a secret. Before writing this article I didn't know Bash myself. I've realized that teaching is the best way to learn. Maybe you can write a part two to this article explaining dates and floating-pointing arithmetic. I'm pretty sure you'll learn a lot from the process! Hope this helps 😃
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This is an excellent article. I've been working (less than I'd like to admit) on learning Bash. I've observed that floating point arithmetic is amazingly difficult (Or i've missed something obvious) and dealing with dates that are not GNU formatted typically yields my writing embarrassing and nonsensical pipes into sed / awk.
Any pointers for doing floating point math and handling dates for newbs like me?
Appreciate your sharing.
Hello @dsbarnes ,
You can not do floating point arithmetic natively in Bash, but there is a trick I use i.e. using the 'bc' command like:
echo "3.142 + 3.142" | bc -l # add the value of pi to itself
echo "sqrt(49)" | bc -l # find the square root of 49
echo "scale=2; sqrt(91)" | bc -l # To find the square root of 91 to just 2 decimal places.
The capabilities of bc is extremely wide. Check the Manpage for its full documentation.
Let me tell you a secret. Before writing this article I didn't know Bash myself. I've realized that teaching is the best way to learn. Maybe you can write a part two to this article explaining dates and floating-pointing arithmetic. I'm pretty sure you'll learn a lot from the process! Hope this helps 😃