A floating-point arithmetic

In Bash shell, we can only perform integer arithmetic. If we want to perform arithmetic involving a floating point or fractional values, then we will need to use various other utilities, such as awk, bc, and similar.

Let's see an example of using the utility called bc:

$ echo "scale=2; 15 / 2" | bc
7.50

For using the bc utility, we need to configure a scale parameter. Scale is the number of significant digits to the right of the decimal point. We have told the bc utility to calculate 15 / 2, and then display the result with the scale of 2.

Or:

$ bc
((83.12 + 32.13) * 37.3)
4298.82

Many things can be done with the bc utility, such as all types of arithmetic operations including binary and unary operations; it has many defined mathematical functions. It has its own programming syntax.

You can get more information about the utility bc at http://www.gnu.org/software/bc/.

Let's look at using awk for a floating-point arithmetic:

$ result=`awk -v a=3.1 -v b=5.2 'BEGIN{printf...