Yep! I considered shelling out to AWK for the same reason, as a bc/dc alternative, but rapidly found that nearly everything else bash could do was easier and le

Yep! I considered shelling out to AWK for the same reason, as a bc/dc alternative, but rapidly found that nearly everything else bash could do was easier and less error-prone (and workable on much older systems) if I moved the whole script into pure AWK.