A small plug for my own script: I'm proud to present the most useful, least-work script I've ever written: `math` https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/m

A small plug for my own script: I'm proud to present the most useful, least-work script I've ever written: `math` https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/math https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/math #!/bin/sh scale=4 # results will print to the 4th decimal echo "scale=$scale; $@" | bc -l It just yeets all its arguments into bc -l, so you can run math 1+2-3 or math '(1024 - 7)*10' or whatever else you want. I even use it in other shell scripts, since bash's math facilities are rather limited and inconsistent across sh vs bash. :~$ echo $(((3+4)*5)) 35 :~$ echo $(((3+4)*5/1024)) 0 :~$ math '((3+4)*5/1024)' .0341 It has all the precision you want, as long as you only want results up to the 4th decimal. It's surprising how much I use it. I find myself absentmindedly typing out math 220*1024*1024 while talking to people in meetings (what, you don't have meetings where it's crucial to know how quickly 220MB can be transferred?) and like thousands of other situations. Meanwhile, funny story: I bought an iPad recently, and discovered that it's a delightful way to pass the time while shopping. You can stick it in your cart and pull up 3blue1brown and zone out while getting your pineapples. So I was doing that, and I went to reach for the calculator app to figure something out, and discovered that there is no calculator on iPads. The punchline is that if you want a calculator on an iPad, it'll either cost you $5 or your soul: https://i.imgur.com/CJsDtB0.jpg https://i.imgur.com/CJsDtB0.jpg Someone please make SpeedCrunch, but MsPaint. I miss MsPaint every day. There's an OS X app called Paintbrush which is similar, but unfortunately quite buggy and somehow even more limited in certain respects. Being able to just paste a screenshot and draw a red circle within 5 seconds is something that I wish we could do in 2022. Nay, I say that it's our right as programmers to be able to do that. </rallying cry> EDIT: formatting. TIL you can backslash-escape asterisks on HN.