>Some great contributions here ... Agreed. >bc -l - the -l option really empowers this awesome little calculator. Right. Since bc is a Unix filter, you can a

>Some great contributions here ... Agreed. >bc -l - the -l option really empowers this awesome little calculator. Right. Since bc is a Unix filter, you can also pipe expressions into it, to be evaluated, so it can be used in general Unix pipelines. E.g.: echo *arithmetic_expression* | bc -l and the output comes on stdout, so it can be further piped. Edit: You have to quote any shell special characters in arithmetic_expression with single quotes, or better, just enclose the entire arithmetic_expression in single quotes. If asterisk (for multiplication) is not quoted, for example, it will be treated as a filename wildcard instead, and likely lead to an error. A wrong and a right example: $ echo 2 + 3 * 4 | bc -l (standard_in) 1: syntax error $ echo '2 + 3 * 4' | bc -l 14