Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear Experts,

I want to use bc to do some multiplication and return me a value with number of decimal places defined by myself.

For example:

Code:

echo "scale=10; 1.65*7" | bc

returns me:

Code:

11.55

But what I really want is to have is a result with 10 digits after the point which should look like:

Code:

11.5500000000

But "scale" just doesn't work here. And, if I want to have result without decimal place, for 11.55, it should return me the result like:

Code:

12

Could I achieve these without the help of other command. I know I could pipe the result to awk or another bc (by division for which scale works), but I just interested in if a single bc with some special option can do it simply?

I would greatly appreciate to your kind help!

Hi, try:

Code:

echo "scale=10; 1.65*7/1" | bc

Anothey way would be...

Code:

echo "1.6500000000*7" | bc

Why does that work for multiplication but not division?

Because divison works exclusively off the internal scale which is initialized to zero by default...but for multiplication both the internal scale and the scale of the factors comes into play...so the scale of x*y is the larger of either the internal scale or the scale of the factors...x or y.