I notice that the author is going into awk for floating point processing. The 1993 language standard for the Korn shell brings floating point into the language

I notice that the author is going into awk for floating point processing. The 1993 language standard for the Korn shell brings floating point into the language as a native data type. This advanced version of the Korn language does not appear to be under active maintenance, but it will likely be much, much faster than handling floating point in awk. Unfortunately, none of the BSD-licensed clones of Korn support the 1993 standards (including floating point). I also see that the author is having some trouble reading individual bytes. Perhaps these shell tricks might be useful. http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html