question about floating point calcuation with shell script / bc

[Peter Boosten]

On Mon, November 12, 2007 14:01, Patrick Dung wrote:
> Hi
>
>
> I have a file with numbers in each line.
> Each number is a decimal number.
> My task is to add them up and get the final answer.
>
>
> I have searched with the search engine.
> I found bash cannot handle floating point calculation.
>
>
> I tried to use 'bc' and found if the final answer is < 1 (eg. 0.2)
> It display .2 instead of 0.2 (no leading zero).
>
>
> Any suggestion or other methods?
> I know ksh could do floating point calculation
> but I am now familiar with ksh.
>

Try awk

awk '{sum += $1} END {printf "%.2f\n", sum}' file

assuming the file consists only of numbers in the first column.

Peter


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