Hi,
I'm need to do some addition and multiplication of scientific nottaion numbers, in the form 34.23423e-10 for example.

I was echoing the list of numbers to stdout, then using bc -l, then I find that this does not seem to work for numbers with exponential notation. Could someone help me out here? I want to do somethng like 'a - b*3=?' Thanks!

Well in ksh,

$ scicalc() { awk 'END { print '"$*"'}' < /dev/null ; return $? ; }
$ set -f
$ scicalc 3.2e2 + 1e3 * 3
3320
$

That "set -f" turns off globbing so the * is not expanded into a list of filenames.