5

I understand bash and some other interpreters only perform arithmetic for integers. In the following for loop, how can I accomplish this? I've read that bc can be used but am not sure how to use bc in this situation.

total=0
for number in `cat /path/to/file`; do
        total=$(($total+$number))
done
average=$(($total/10))
echo Average is $average

file:

1.143362
1.193994
1.210489
1.210540
1.227611
1.243496
1.260872
1.276752
1.294121
1.427371
John B
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4 Answers4

11

You may not want to use bc for this. Perhaps awk would work better:

awk '{sum+=$1};END{print sum/NR}' /path/to/file
Stéphane Chazelas
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8

As tagged , here is a bash 4.0 alternative to choroba's answer, to avoid wc and sed:

bash-4.2$ mapfile -t a < file

bash-4.2$ (IFS='+'; echo "(${a[*]})/${#a[@]}") | bc -l
1.24886080000000000000
Community
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manatwork
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  • If it's about bash I think this is much nicer: `shopt -s extglob; value=...; value="${value%%*(0)}"; if [ -z "${value##*.}" ]; then value="${value}0"; fi; echo "$value"`. But for next time: I note your "Organizer" badge... 8-) – Hauke Laging May 16 '13 at 14:05
3

I usually use bc for floating point arithmetics:

file=1.txt
echo '('$(<$file)')/'$(wc -l < $file) | sed 's/ /+/g' | bc -l
choroba
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0
term=0
file=input
for number in `cat "$file"`; do
        term="${term}+${number}"
done
total="$(echo "$term" | bc -l)"
average="$(echo "${total}/10" | bc -l)"
average="$(echo "$average" | sed -e 's/^\(.*\..*[^0]\)0*/\1/' -e p)"
echo "Total: ${total}"
echo "Average: ${average}"
Hauke Laging
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  • @JohnB Then you should accept it as answer (i.e. click on the green check mark below the voting for my answer). – Hauke Laging May 16 '13 at 13:48
  • :) I guess it's not hard to tell I'm new to the site...and scripting. – John B May 16 '13 at 13:53
  • For some reason, using `sed` in this solution caused $average to echo twice. I substituted with `cut -c-9` and it fixed it. Have no clue why. – John B May 16 '13 at 14:23
  • @JohnB You should really try the `awk` alternative. Don't use `bash` for these kind of tasks! – Bernhard May 16 '13 at 14:58