Hello there,

I have a script that must be written in bash that has to deal with reading in values from a file (in scientific notation), and requires executing some mathematical operations with them. What is the easiest way to go about doing this/converting it to float to use | bc, etc.?

Thanks!

This should be a basic example:

a=65; b=1.11; c=30 ; echo "scale= $a; $b ^ $c" | bc

I think the main problem here is the "scientific notation". I guess you mean numbers like 1.234e29 which are not supported by bc either?

Maybe something like this ...?

echo "1.234e23 9.876e14" | sed -e 's/ /*/' | perl -nle 'print eval $_'

bc can do the job

echo "1.234e23 9.876e14" | sed 's/e/*10^/g;s/ /*/' | bc

Good catch; thanks for the correction.

Or just awk:

awk -v a="1.234e23" -v b="9.876e14" 'BEGIN{print (a * b)}'

Thanks all, in case you are interested -- I ended up using sed:

floatVar1=$(echo $Var1 | sed 's/\([0-9]*\(\.[0-9]*\)\?\)[eE]+\?\(-\?[0-9]*\)/(\1*10^\3)/g;s/^/scale=30;/'| bc)

There are some difficulties with the specific scientific notation my data files were using. (having an extra + after the E, 1.00e+1 = 10), so I had trouble getting bc to work, but I may have just messed up. However, the idea behind the question was supposed to be specifically how to convert something from scientific notation to float. Sorry for the confusion.