bc¶

Introduction ¶

This short page contains the bc commands I want to keep at hand. I’m a very very occasional user of bc, and the commands provided on this page may not be the best solutions to the problems.

Convert a list of hexadecimal numbers to decimal ¶

Let’s say we have a text file called hexnum containing hexadecimal numbers (one per line, uppercase or lower case):

1
10
f
FF

The following Bash command line outputs the same numbers converted to decimal:

while IFS= read -r LINE; \
   do echo "ibase=16; $(echo $LINE|tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')" | bc; \
done < hexnum

Convert a list of hexadecimal numbers to decimal and multiply by a constant ¶

The following Bash command line does the same as the one except that the output is multiplied by 0.00005:

while IFS= read -r LINE; \
   do echo n="$(echo "ibase=16; \
       $(echo $LINE|tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')" | bc); \
       n * 0.00005" | bc; \
done < hexnum

Other resources ¶

bc man page