It would have been very helpful if you had told us what errors you were getting, how you expected to invoke your script, and that you wanted to be able to perform floating point arithmetic up front instead of asking us to waste our time guessing at what you might be trying to do. Please don't assume that we can always figure out what you're trying to do by looking at code that won't work. Most of us don't have a crystal ball that works that well.

Have you considered using ksh instead of bash? A 1993 or later version of the Korn shell handles floating point values in addition to handling integers (although I'm not sure it will accept floating point values as the right hand operand in a mod operation). You haven't said anything about the range or precision of the numbers you expect to encounter. The bc utility can handle arbitrary precision (if you tell it what precision you want, which your bc scripts do not do) while ksh will limit you to double-precision floating point arithmetic.

Note also that if you have floating point values for any of your operands, you can't use bash arithmetic expansions to perform arithmetic (even after using bc to compare numbers). You'll get syntax error from bash if any of the operands in an arithmetic expansion aren't integers.

And, statements in your original code like:

Code:

    VarAdd=$( $1 % $VarStandard )

are not arithmetic expansions; they are command substitutions. That statement attempts to execute the utility named by whatever $1 expands to with the two operands % and 4 (which is what $VarStandard expands to in your sample script) and assign the output written to standard output by that utility to the shell variable named VarAdd. Arithmetic expansions are of the form:

Code:

$((expression))

(note the double parentheses instead of single parentheses).

If you really need arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic to perform all of these calculations, have you considered writing all of those calculations as a single bc script so you only have to invoke bc once instead of ten times?