5

I'm just starting with Gnu's bc and I'm stuck at the very beginning (very discouraging...). I want to divide two numbers and get a float as result:

$bc
bc 1.06.94
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'. 

15/12
1
15.0/12.0
1
15.000000/12.000000
1
scale(15.00000)
5

The man page says, that division returns a number with the same scale as the initial values. Obviously this is either not true or I'm missing something.

Googling hasn't brought up any new insights (besides that 'BC' can also stand for 'British Columbia').

Do you see my error? Better yet, do you know any good references/tutorials to bc?

Boldewyn
  • 4,468

4 Answers4

8

You can set the scale with

scale=2

Then division works as expected:

scale=2
15/12
1.25

To quote from Wikipedia:

All numbers and variable contents are arbitrary precision numbers whose precision (in decimal places) is determined by the global scale variable.

Joey
  • 41,098
7

Use bc -l, which preloads the math library and the default scale is set to 20.

$ bc -l
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'. 
4/3
1.33333333333333333333
jlbartos
  • 71
3

To expand on Colin_Daly, use BC_ENV_ARGS="-q $HOME/.bcrc", with scale=INT in .bcrc obviously. The environment variable is basically just stuck right after the bc command.

What's happening is that -q is just a normal command line option, and $HOME/.bcrc is expanded and fed into bc as the first file argument (there can be multiple file arguments). scale=INT is a line of bc, which is a programming language. It's functionally equivalent to running bc and entering scale=INT on the bc prompt. You have to use $HOME and not ~ because ~ is only recognized when it's not quoted (see here), but we need some sort of quoting so the variable is set to both words, not just up to the space.

Community
  • 1
andkore
  • 31
1

In case this helps anyone, I was trying to get scale=2 and quiet mode set by default and I couldn't seem to get it right.

If I set BC_ENV_VARS="-q", I got quiet mode and if I set BC_ENV_VARS="~/.bcrc", I could set scale=2 in this file but I couldn't turn on quiet mode (maybe there is a way but I couldn't find it).

In the end I used export BC_ENV_ARGS=~/.bcrc (with scale=2) and aliased bc to bc -q.

slhck
  • 235,242
Colin Daly
  • 11