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command-line calculations using bc
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If like me, you do most of your work from the command-line, using Home Page
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vim to edit files, mutt for e-mails, cd/ls/mv/find/etc instead of a file
manager, then you may get annoyed by having to fire up a GUI sl iaD tetcatn
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calculator to make (what may sometimes be) a single calculation. rob@basicallytech.com
One useful feature of calculating on the command-line is that youetS

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can see what you've typed. For instance, sometimes when I'm Exotic Trousers
entering a long, complex calculation on a calculator (either the GUI
or the solid, hold-in-your-hand type), I sometimes forget if I've radnelC
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actually typed in all those numbers or made the calculations in the « March '15
right order. Maybe it's just me ... S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
This article shows how to quickly perform standard calculations on
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
the command line including addition, subtraction, multiplication, 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
division, square root, powers, conversion from decimal to hex, 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
decimal to binary, hex to decimal, and binary to decimal. It also 29 30 31
briefly introduces using bc in interactive mode and how to write files
Scan for Bash Bug Now
for use with bc for frequently repeated operations. There is a Download LanGuard & Scan Devices
mention of using Google for performing calulations. It finishes with Under Your Management Today!
a little challenge to test the power of your CPU.
Other advantages of using bc include: hcraeskcQ

iu
bc is included with (almost?) all Linux distros as standard, as >

well as (again, almost?) all Unices.
Results from calculations in some proprietary flavours of bc sevihcA
r
have up to 99 decimal digits before and after the decimal March 2015
point. This limit has been greatly surpassed in GNU bc. I don't
February 2015
know what that limit is, but it's at least many, many tens of
January 2015
thousands. Certainly it's more than any GUI-based calculators
Recent...
(I've used) could accomodate.
Older...
You may also find yourself working in an environment where
you simply don't have access to a GUI. seirogetC
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The syntax for basic sums is almost identical to Google's blog
calculator function, so you can learn how to use two utilities
interesting
in one go!
news
bc is a preprocessor for dc. The useful thing about bc is that it open source
accepts input from files and from standard input. This allows us to opinion
pipe data to it for quick calculations. security
addition technical
subtraction technology
multiplication
scale Go!
division
All categories
square root
power sihTetacidnS
y
parentheses goB l
obase and ibase RSS 0.91 feed
convert from decimal to hexadecimal RSS 1.0 feed
convert from decimal to binary RSS 2.0 feed
convert from binary to decimal ATOM 0.3 feed
convert from hexadecimal to decimal ATOM 1.0 feed
a brief introduction to interactive mode
RSS 2.0 Comments
using bc with shell scripts
a brief introduction to using bc with files
converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com
a quick challenge for your PC (GNU bc only) Free Publishing Guide
Do you have a manuscript that is
ready to publish? Get started now!
Most of these examples follow a simple formula.
addition ybdew
oreP
$ echo '57+43' | bc
100
subtraction
$ echo '57-43' | bc
14
multiplication
$ echo '57*43' | bc
2451
scale
The scale variable determines the number of digits which follow the
decimal point in your result. By default, the value of the scale
variable is zero. (Unless you use the -l option in which case it
defaults to 20 decimal places. More about -l later.) This can be set
by declaring scale before your calculation, as in the following
division example:
division
$ echo 'scale=25;57/43' | bc
1.3255813953488372093023255
square root
$ echo 'scale=30;sqrt(2)' | bc
1.414213562373095048801688724209
This beats Google's calculator function which only calculates the

result to 8 decimal places! Although Google's calculator function
has this 8 decimal places limitation, it will allow imaginary numbers
as answers.
power
$ echo '6^6' | bc
46656
parentheses
If you have read Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, you
may recall that the number of parallel universes in the story equals
(six to the power of six) to the power of six. If you should try to
calculate that like this:
$ echo '6^6^6' | bc
You will get a screen full of numbers (some 37374 digits), not the
10314424798490535546171949056
that you might expect.
If you're running a non-GNU version of bc, you'll most likely get

something like:
exp too big
empty stack
save:args
The Google Calculator balks at '6^6^6' as well. Good ol' GNU.
That's because you typed the wrong question. You need to type:
$ echo '(6^6)^6' | bc
Whereas what you did type was interpreted as:

$ echo '6^(6^6)' | bc
which is an entirely different number altogether. So the positioning

of parentheses (brackets to you and me!) is very important. I use
brackets to separate the different components of my sums
whenever possible, just eliminate any possible doubt that I may get
the wrong answer. Consider the following calculations:
$ echo '7+(6*5)' | bc
$ echo '7+6*5' | bc
$ echo '6*5+7' | bc
They all give the same answer, 37, but I would have typed the first
calculation, unless of course, I meant:
$ echo '(7+6)*5' | bc
Or to put it another way:

$ echo '13*5' | bc
which is 65.
obase and ibase
obase and ibase are special variables which define output and input
base.
Legitimate obase values range from 2 to 999, although anything

beyond 16 is wasted on me!
Legitimate ibase values range from 2 to 16.
Some examples will explain all this better.
convert from decimal to hexadecimal
Here we're converting 255 from base 10 to base 16:

$ echo 'obase=16;255' | bc
FF
convert from decimal to binary
And here we're converting the number 12 from base 10 to base 2:

$ echo 'obase=2;12' | bc
1100
Which reminds me of the old joke:
There are only 10 types of people in the world -- those who

understand binary, and those who don't.
Which leads us neatly onto the next example:
convert from binary to decimal
Here we're converting the binary number 10 to a base 10 (decimal)
number.
$ echo 'ibase=2;obase=A;10' | bc
Note that the obase is "A" and not "10". Sorry, you've got to learn
some hex. The reason for this is you've set the ibase to "2", so if
you now had tried to use "10" as the value for the obase, it would
stay as "2", because "10" in base 2 is "2". So you need to use hex
to "break out" of binary mode.
Well, that was just to explain the joke; now something a bit more
challenging:
$ echo 'ibase=2;obase=A;10000001' | bc
129
convert from hexadecimal to decimal
$ echo 'ibase=16;obase=A;FF' | bc
255
Again, note the use of "A" to denote base 10. That is because "10"
in hex (base 16 - the ibase value) is 16.
a brief introduction to interactive mode
You can also run bc in interactive mode:

$ bc
If you're running GNU bc, you should get the following notice:
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
Followed by an uninviting blank prompt. Otherwise you'll just get an

uninviting blank prompt.
If you wish to get straight to the uninviting blank prompt, use the
-q option, which runs bc in quiet mode, preventing the normal GNU
bc welcome from being printed:
$ bc -q
Using the basics we've been through from the examples above,
enter a calculation:
scale=5
57/43
1.32558
Type quit to exit bc interactive mode.
using bc with shell scripts
You can use shell variables with bc, which is very useful in shell
scripts:
$ FIVE=5 ; echo "$FIVE^2" | bc
25
Note the use of double-quotes to preserve the value of the variable

$FIVE.
a brief introduction to using bc with files
Using bc with files allows complex calculations to be repeated, again
and again, a bit like using a spreadsheet to run the same
calculations on changing figures ... but faster.
Here is a simple example:
scale=2
/* C-style comments
are allowed, as are spaces */
print "\nConvert Fahrenheit to Celsius\n\n"

print "Temperature in Fahrenheit: " ; fah = read()
print "\n"
print "Equivalent Temperature in Celsius is: "
(fah - 32.0) * 5.0 / 9.0
quit
Create and save the file, then run it like this:

$ bc -q filename
Convert Fahrenheit to Celsius
Temperature in Fahrenheit: 61
Equivalent Temperature in Celsius is: 16.11
Note that this example has only been tested with GNU bc. Other
(proprietary) versions of bc may have more stringent syntax
requirements. Some bcs don't allow the use of print or read, for
example, so you have to edit your file before each calculation. Not
very useful.
a quick challenge for your PC (GNU bc only)
If you wish to test the comparative speed of your PC, try this
challenge: use bc to calculate Pi to 5000 decimal places. The idea for
this challenge came from a great article at Geekronomicon.
If you really want to tie up your machine for an hour (or more), you
could try the "Pi to 25000 decimal places" challenge from the
aforementioned Geekronomicon.
First, to put things in perspective, here is some information about

my CPU:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | egrep "model name|MHz"
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+

cpu MHz : 2211.346
Note the use (below) of the command bc -l -q.

-l loads the math library which is required for the use of the "a"
(arctangent) in the calculation for Pi. You can learn more about the
math library functions in the bc command manual.
I'm not sure what effect the -q option (quiet, no welcome message
printed) has on our test, but I guess it can't harm.
$ time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l -q
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\
...
...
...
73774418426312986080998886874132604720
real 0m44.164s
user 0m44.099s
sys 0m0.008s
44.099 seconds! Not bad. I imagine that some Gentoo folks may
be interested to see what difference their compile-time
optimisations make to the speed of bc. FWIW, my distro of choice
is Arch Linux.
useful links
GNU bc manual
Google's calculator function
Posted by Rob Newcater in technical C omments: (65) Trackbacks: (5)
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Command-line calculation using bc

"bc" (the arbitrary precision calculator language) is a
mighty tool for command-line calculation. Who always wanted to
use it, but was afraid due to the complexity of this tool can find a
brief introduction to it here.(via OSnews)
Weblog: Doomshammer's Weblog

Tracked: Nov 27, 13:14
Basically Tech: command-line calculations using bc

If like me, you do most of your work from the command-line, using
vim to edit files, mutt for e-mails, cd/ls/mv/find/etc instead of a file
manager, then you may get annoyed by having to fire up a GUI
calculator to make (what may sometimes be) a single cal...
Weblog: Lancelott の...

Tracked: Dec 04, 10:49
More Cool Links

Must be a full moon or something...
Weblog: A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru

Tracked: Feb 01, 16:24
#21: The command line calculator bc

This article is part of the 2010 Advent calendar series “24 Short
Linux Hints”. This series focuses on little (and sometimes longer)
tricks, tips and hints to solve common problems and really improve
your workflow. Performing calculations on the command
Weblog: Refining Linux

Tracked: Dec 20, 23:02
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Tracked: Apr 12, 16:37
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flamebaitdetector said,
Monday, November 27. 2006 at 11:43 (Reply)
nice article, but no need to flame buddy. if you're going to
mention something about an OS, even as a joke, you're going to
start a flame war.
also, how prevalent is python becoming because i find it a lot

easier to use than bc, especially with all the other easy-to-import
modules.
Rob said,
Monday, November 27. 2006 at 12:02 (Link) (Reply)
I can't see anything inflammatory in what I've posted. Please

explain further about the flame thing; I guess I'm a bit naive
about these matters ... the last thing I want to do is start
something unintentionally.
Tom said,
Mine did it in 41 secs with the same CPU in Ubuntu......
real 0m41.555s
user 0m41.275s
sys 0m0.152s
benoit said,
Hi folks,
Can someone out here tell me how to stream calculations

through bc ?
e.g.: I want to compute to amount of space needed to copy all
Java source files located in /home/me/src ?
bash# find /path -type f -iname '*.txt' -ls | gawk '{print $7 }' |
.... | bc
What should the dots look like ?

Thank you,
Benoît
Rob said,
Hi Benoît,
There is no requirement for bc. You could use something like:
find /path -type f -iname '*.txt' -ls | gawk '{ s += $7 } END {

print s }'
Regards,
Rob
Chuck Messenger said,

How about:
$ find /path -type f -iname '*.txt' -ls | gawk
'{sum+=$7}END{print sum}'
Axel said,
How have I missed this??
Thank you very much!
DES said,
4*atan(1) is not an approximation of pi, it is exactly pi, since the

tangent of a 45-degree angle (= pi/4 radians) is 1.
Rob said,
Hi Des,
Oops. Sorry, maths is not my strong point, hence my

reliance on bc! I'll edit the post when I get a chance (this
evening). Thanks for the correction.
Regards,
Rob
LeLutin said,
Tuesday, November 28. 2006 at 03:53 (Reply)
4 atan( 1 ) is in fact a function using an approximation based
on infinite Taylor series. it is obtained by substituting x=1 in
the infinite series obtained from atan( x )
it does compute the value of Pi but converges pretty slowly. for

example, after calculating the 5th term of the series, the
approximation is around 3.339
using the same method but replacing x=1/sqrt( 3 ) instead
gets quicker near the value of Pi. after the 5th term of the
series, the approximation of Pi is 3.14260
reference: http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pi-
calc.html
matt evans said,

My powermac g5 running 10.4.8 did the Pi test in 1 minute

31.447 seconds. I'll give it a try on my Intel Mac at home and see
what comes up.
Henno said,
My powerbook G4 did it in 1m 13s.

(OS X 10.4. No Intel machine to test with..... Strange that
G5 is slower..
Chris said,
Athlon 2100 running gentoo:

real 1m8.500s
user 1m8.302s
sys 0m0.084s
gentoo user said,

Sunday, December 10. 2006 at 10:19 (Reply)
1m 3s on gentoo
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1700MHz

cpu MHz : 1700.000
gjohnson said,
Am I missing something or is there a bug?
01010101 bin is 55 hex.
However when I type echo 'ibase=2;obase=F;01010101' | bc the
answer comes back 5A hex.
What is going on? I tried it on Debian Linux, NetBSD and
OpenBSD. Must be operator error, should obase be set to
something else?
nugunga said,
it's a little bit tricky.
echo 'ibase=2;obase=F;01010101' | bc
you're using decimal 15 (hex F) as output base.
0x55 = 5*16+5 = 85
(dec) = 5*15+10 = 5A (base 15)
Try to express obase in binary:

echo 'ibase=2;obase=10000;01010101' | bc
woody said,
Wednesday, November 29. 2006 at 01:34 (Reply)
put the 'OBASE' earlier than the 'IBASE'.

i.e)
echo 'obase=16;ibase=2;01010101' | bc
no tricky at all
Hex said,
1.5GHz Powerbook PPC Macintosh
real 4m10.032s
user 2m38.012s
sys 0m1.403s
omg...gotta get a new laptop...
Volt said,
Wow. What's up with that? I didn't want to fill the comments
with "benchmark" numbers, but that was surprising.
On my 1.5GHz PowerBook G4; OS X 10.4.8:
real 1m36.602s
user 1m19.415s
sys 0m1.057s
The G4s also seem to be a little faster than the G5s for some
reason.
Brad said,
Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5
OS/X version 10.4.8
real 1m29.076s
user 1m27.758s
sys 0m0.570s
nugunga said,
Celeron 1400 / NetBSD 3.1
GP/PARI CALCULATOR Version 2.1.6

(which is my favourite calculator)
(20:17) gp > \p 5000

realprecision = 5009 significant digits (5000 digits displayed)
(20:17) gp > 4*atan(1.)
time = 24 ms.
%1 = 3.141592653589793238462643[...]
Chris said,
However when I type echo 'ibase=2;obase=F;01010101' | bc the

answer comes back 5A hex.
obase=F is setting the output base to 15
echo 'ibase=2;obase=10000;01010101' | bc
55
echo 'obase=16;ibase=2;01010101' | bc
55
Lothar said,
model name : AMD Athlon(tm)
cpu MHz : 2000.082
real 0m58.122s
user 0m57.960s
sys 0m0.068s
Not bad for a $50 cpu
pMax said,
Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Mobile CPU 700MHz
real 2m47.996s
user 2m37.566s
sys 0m0.084s
~2x your G5, but ~10x older
Steve said,
Twinhead Durabook R15D
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz (1601 BogoMips)
real 1m5.593s
user 1m4.892s
sys 0m0.008s
Using Debian Testing with a locally compiled 2.6.15 (preempt)

kernel.
Ravi said,
Macbook Pro (Core Duo with 2 gigs of RAM running OS X 10.4)
real 0m55.205s
user 0m55.013s
sys 0m0.103s
Not very fast!
PiX said,
Tuesday, November 28. 2006 at 09:04 (Link) (Reply)
Welcome to the "Mine is bigger than yours" contest
Dale Strickland-Clark said,

Everyone is bound to be curious how their machine stacks up

using this as a little benchmark.
cat /proc/cpuinfo | egrep "model name|MHz"

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
cpu MHz : 2394.062
cpu MHz : 2394.062
real 0m35.305s
user 0m35.178s
sys 0m0.108s
Of course, it only used one CPU so I got on with some work while
it was running.
I generally use dc rather than bc as I've always preferred

Reverse Polish notation.
Linulin said,
gdb, (yes, the debugger), could be also useful for simple
interactive calculations:
(gdb) p 3.0/8
$1 = 0.375
(gdb) p $1*(5-9)
$2 = -1.5
(gdb) p/x 255
$3 = 0xff
(gdb) p/c 35
$4 = 35 '#'
(gdb) help p
(gdb) help x
Alessandro said,
I want to share this marvel (not mine, but forgot where I took
it): in my opinion it surpasses any other console calculator, giving
you all the power of perl too - provided perl is installed, as it
should on any average system:
in you .bash_profile, just put
calc(){ perl -wlne'print eval'; }

export -f calc
and use calc from the command line (exit with Ctrl-C)
Alessandro
BasketCase said,
Tuesday, November 28. 2006 at 16:25 (Link) (Reply)
It is good to know bc since bc is available on most UNIX systems.
This is the same reason it is good to know vi.
However, if you find yourself using it often you should try calc
(http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc/) instead as it is a
bit nicer.
If you like the RPN style calculators (like HP) then you should try
Orpie (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pelzlpj/orpie/)
pepe said,
in most cases, shell-features will do. Don't know if it's bash-
specific, but try:
echo $((4+5))
"let" is also nice, ignorant as I am I only use it for shell-loops
sometimes:
i=4
for foo in bar; do something with foo; let i+=2; done
But bc is indeed a nice tool, I'm doing my cryptography

homework with it.
cu,
pepe
adren said,
Useless use of cat (only one arg) spotted
http://sial.org/howto/shell/useless-cat/
so instead of
one might just use
egrep "model name|MHz" < /proc/cpuinfo
Anonymous said,
> Useless use of cat [] spotted
In the same vein, useless use of shell redirection spotted. Use

the grep/egrep file parameter, thus avoiding redirection:
egrep "model name|MHz" /proc/cpuinfo
BTW:
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 242
cpu MHz : 1589.818
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 242
cpu MHz : 1589.818
So dual Opteron, 1.6 GHz, but bc appears to be single

threaded, so only one CPU is used, but my streaming
hurricanefm.com kaffeine session w/ goom visualization running
mostly on the other CPU continued uninterrupted. (It and other
system processes are using ~10% on the CPU bc used, thus
the realtime/usertime discrepancy). Gentoo/amd64, vanilla
2.6.19-rc5 kernel, glibc 2.4-r4 (2.5 seems to have SMP?
memory ops handling issues that cause crashes in various a/v
apps such as kaffeine and xmms), gcc 4.1.1-r2.
real 1m32.591s
user 1m22.830s
sys 0m0.110s
I'll be upgrading to dual-core 2.6 GHz Opti 285s soon -- street

prices are down to ~$1200 for the pair. Looking forward to the
four-way processing AND the MHz boost. =8^)
Very useful article -- bookmarked! I'd discovered bc based on a

chance comment I read somewhere, but hadn't used it a lot
and hadn't discovered the scale or i/obase options, so found it
rather limited, particularly for division. This helps greatly! I'm
also a fan of RPN, so now have dc to explore. =8^)
Danny C. said,
Trying to do benchmarks using BC is pretty fruitless, as BC's

performance is highly dependant on a number of factors, like
which version of source, what architecture, and what
optimizations switches were used when it was compiled.
You guys are comparing apples and screwdrivers.
xinuflux said,
Thursday, November 30. 2006 at 01:56 (Reply)
one item missing from some of the bc alternatives mentioned in
the comments is bc's wonderful ability to use history via readline
like bash does (if compiled properly)
pavlinux said,
Friday, December 1. 2006 at 20:08 (Link) (Reply)
# time echo 'scale=25; sqrt(66 6)' | bc

.......
real 1m14.555s
user 1m13.407s
sys 0m0.157s
....
In Maple 10, less than one second.
Zed said,
real 0m31.109s
user 0m31.098s
sys 0m0.008s
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5150 @ 2.66GHz

cpu MHz : 2666.838
from work server with minimal load (HP DL380g5, 2x dual core,
8GB ram, 4 x 147gb sas in RAID5)
Rich said,
Wednesday, December 6. 2006 at 20:05 (Reply)
Running cygwin on windows xp and a 2.6GHZ hyperthreading
P4...
real 1m27.282s
user 1m26.795s
sys 0m0.046s
Pat said,
You don't actually need the quotes in
FIVE=5 ; echo "$FIVE^2" | bc
Using
FIVE=5 ; echo $FIVE^2 | bc
works just as well (as you actually want the shell to substitute 5
for $FIVE). On some shells you may need to escape/quote the ^
thou...
ceugenio said,
Sunday, December 10. 2006 at 11:57 (Link) (Reply)
Good article! - I've translated into spanish in

http://ceugenio.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/calculos-desde-la-
linea-de-comandos-usando-bc/
Thanks!
Holonic said,
Wednesday, December 13. 2006 at 13:25 (Reply)
cpu MHz : 600.000
cpu MHz : 600.000
real 0m30.290s
user 0m30.235s
sys 0m0.040s
Note my cpu is overclocked to 2800GHz, the OS being FC6
ishit said,
Thursday, December 14. 2006 at 16:40 (Reply)
FYI.
bc benchmark test(?) = bcbench.

time sh -c 'echo "scale=2000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l' > /dev/nul
time sh -c 'echo "scale=2000; e(1)" | bc -l' > /dev/null
Mr.Oshima presentation (BSD Conference Japan at Nagoya,Japan

2005)
http://www.nagoya.bug.gr.jp/~oshima/nbug/etc/bench/index.html
(Japanese)
http://www.nagoya.bug.gr.jp/~oshima/nbug/etc/bench/bcbench.html
(score and graph) (Japanese)
My English many broken. I am Sorry.
Mario said,
Saturday, November 8. 2008 at 17:47 (Reply)
That's a really poor measure of performance. On my 8 core (2
physical Xeon 2.8 GHz processors each with 4 cores) the CPU
usage was only 13% and it took 36 seconds.
Oscar_the_Grouch said,
Monday, March 30. 2009 at 22:49 (Reply)
That's because it's not multi-threaded, and is using but a
single processor.
Your metrics prove it: 13% (12.5% really) is 1/8th of 100%.

So yes, you maxxed out the one proc, while the rest where
chillin'.
You must be new...
manolo said,
Friday, December 19. 2008 at 11:03 (Reply)
Hello,
Need help please
How I can compute a arc cosine with bc -l ?

I did not found the syntax or the trick!
thanks a lot
Oscar_the_Grouch said,
Monday, March 30. 2009 at 23:20 (Reply)
Trig Identities:
(Google FTW)
y = arccos(x) is the equivalent of x = cos(y)
Hayden Barker said,

Friday, April 3. 2009 at 21:14 (Reply)
Hi THere,
I'd like to calculate pi to 1,000,000 decimal places and save it to a

text file... possible using this method ?
I have tried "..." > pi.txt but it just has an empty file.
Suggestions ?
netwoR said,
Sunday, April 26. 2009 at 10:26 (Reply)
"..." 1> pi.txt
Michael said,
Saturday, July 25. 2009 at 21:11 (Reply)
I am forgotten how to prevent the "\\" character at the end of

each line of bc. I thought it was something like an environment
variable.. I.e. echo "scale=100;last=10;8/(1+(1/3))"|bc
produces
6.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
0000000000000000000000000000000001
I want that "nasty" \ to be removed and the output returns one
big line. I know it is possible because long time ago it succeeded
me, but i am unfortunately forgotten how...
Thanks in advance and i am looking forward to the solution...
Rob Newcater said,

Saturday, July 25. 2009 at 22:47 (Link) (Reply)
$ export BC_LINE_LENGTH=105
$ echo "scale=100;last=10;8/(1+(1/3))"|bc
6.0000000...(etc)...0000001
Michael said,
Saturday, July 25. 2009 at 22:52 (Reply)
Thanks for sharing.
(
by the way
Just looked at the source main.c and found the statement:
env_value = getenv ("BC_LINE_LENGTH");
if (env_value != NULL)
{
line_size = atoi (env_value);
if (line_size < 2)
line_size = 70;
}
else
line_size = 70;
always nice to have a change to peek at the source
)
kirk said,
Thursday, September 17. 2009 at 09:53 (Link) (Reply)
help me i cant evan do a simple 3+3
what do you type in the command prompt!?!?
Bill Abbott said,

Tuesday, May 18. 2010 at 01:44 (Link) (Reply)
Minimalist version:
echo ' 3 + 3 ' | bc
Try that at a Unix/Linux/Cigwin prompt.

Note single quotes.
Here's a more elaborate version, which puts the answer into a

variable "xyzzy" which can be used further along in a command
line or shell script (BASH in my case)
$ xyzzy=`echo '1.35 - 1.05' | bc`;\

> echo xyzzy: $xyzzy
xyzzy: .30
NOTE that both the $ and > are system prompts. Note also
that the outer quote marks are backticks ie ` while the inner
quotes are single quotes ie '
Keith said,
Tuesday, May 4. 2010 at 19:57 (Link) (Reply)
I use Midnight Commander as a file manager, personally. It's very
nice and is faster and more powerful than X file managers. I could
never figure out mutt, personally.
lex said,
Wednesday, September 29. 2010 at 13:54 (Link) (Reply)
Distro: Ubuntu Lucyd Lynx
CPUs: 4 x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
cpu MHz : 1600.000
real 0m36.001s
user 0m35.940s
sys 0m0.050s
Blackmail said,
Sunday, October 3. 2010 at 22:54 (Reply)
Well some info, tell me what you think:
real 0m44.267s
user 0m43.787s
sys 0m0.008s
and the processor is:
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+

cpu MHz : 2411.319
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+
cpu MHz : 2411.319
I also had Firefox open, i was watching a sitcom and opened

WOW with the latest patch emulated through wine.
BTW great article thnx for sharing the info
Michael said,
Thursday, October 14. 2010 at 09:57 (Reply)
Alas, bc doesn't understand lower case hex digits, which as I'm
copy and pasting my numbers from disassembly listings and
symbol tables makes it useless to me
Lordy said,
Friday, November 26. 2010 at 05:34 (Reply)
running virtual box on window7
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz

cpu MHz : 0.000
real 0m40.616s
user 0m40.363s
sys 0m0.032s
Steve said,
Wednesday, July 13. 2011 at 20:04 (Reply)
any idea why this happens?
echo "ibase=16;obase=F;104D7" | bc
14BBA
echo "ibase=F;obase=F;104D7" | bc
104D7
Does obase take precedence over ibase and ibase should be in

hex?
Rob said,
Wednesday, July 13. 2011 at 21:33 (Reply)
According to the man page, valid ibase values are 2 through to
16. In Hex, 16 is 10, so having set ibase to F, you need to set
obase to 10 if you want hex output, e.g.
$ echo 'ibase=16;obase=10;FF*FF' | bc
FE01
$ echo 'ibase=16;obase=A;FF*FF' | bc
65025
russ said,
Sunday, August 7. 2011 at 02:02 (Reply)
real 0m19.653s
user 0m19.468s
sys 0m0.046s
4.2 GHz i2500k
Gauri said,
Friday, April 13. 2012 at 11:32 (Reply)
I want to perform the calculation:
22.20 - 22.10
I want the o/p to be
00.10
instead of jst .10
Pls help asap
priya said,
Monday, September 10. 2012 at 15:31 (Reply)
how to perform control statements using bc
sean said,
Saturday, December 29. 2012 at 19:14 (Reply)
I have ibase=C, and obase=C, when I do something like 2/3 I get

0.7BBBBB rather than the correct answer 0.800000. What am I
doing wrong?
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command-line calculations using bc

One useful feature of calculating on the command-line is that youetS

a little challenge to test the power of your CPU.

Other advantages of using bc include: hcraeskcQ

bc is included with (almost?) all Linux distros as standard, as >

This beats Google's calculator function which only calculates the

that you might expect.

If you're running a non-GNU version of bc, you'll most likely get

The Google Calculator balks at '6^6^6' as well. Good ol' GNU.

Whereas what you did type was interpreted as:

which is an entirely different number altogether. So the positioning

Or to put it another way:

obase and ibase

Legitimate obase values range from 2 to 999, although anything

Legitimate ibase values range from 2 to 16.

Some examples will explain all this better.

convert from decimal to hexadecimal

Here we're converting 255 from base 10 to base 16:

convert from decimal to binary

And here we're converting the number 12 from base 10 to base 2:

Which reminds me of the old joke:

There are only 10 types of people in the world -- those who

Which leads us neatly onto the next example:

convert from binary to decimal

convert from hexadecimal to decimal

a brief introduction to interactive mode

You can also run bc in interactive mode:

Followed by an uninviting blank prompt. Otherwise you'll just get an

Type quit to exit bc interactive mode.

using bc with shell scripts

Note the use of double-quotes to preserve the value of the variable

a brief introduction to using bc with files

Here is a simple example:

print "\nConvert Fahrenheit to Celsius\n\n"

Create and save the file, then run it like this:

Convert Fahrenheit to Celsius

a quick challenge for your PC (GNU bc only)

First, to put things in perspective, here is some information about

model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+

Note the use (below) of the command bc -l -q.

Google's calculator function

Posted by Rob Newcater in technical C omments: (65) Trackbacks: (5)

Command-line calculation using bc

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More Cool Links

Weblog: A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru

#21: The command line calculator bc

Weblog: Refining Linux

nice article, but no need to flame buddy. if you're going to

also, how prevalent is python becoming because i find it a lot

I can't see anything inflammatory in what I've posted. Please

Mine did it in 41 secs with the same CPU in Ubuntu......

Can someone out here tell me how to stream calculations

What should the dots look like ?

There is no requirement for bc. You could use something like:

find /path -type f -iname '*.txt' -ls | gawk '{ s += $7 } END {

Chuck Messenger said,

Thank you very much!

4*atan(1) is not an approximation of pi, it is exactly pi, since the

Oops. Sorry, maths is not my strong point, hence my

it does compute the value of Pi but converges pretty slowly. for