Have you ever wanted to “just do some math” without much fuss? I noticed a while ago (but haven’t really used it since) that bash (born again shell) has, amongst many other evaluations, an arithmetic one. Using the syntax $((expression))
you can evaluate the expression to arithmetically. Operations allowed are quite a few. From man bash
:
ARITHMETIC EVALUATION
The shell allows arithmetic expressions to be evaluated, under certain circumstances (see the let and declare builtin commands and Arithmetic Expansion). Evaluation is done in fixed-width integers with no check for overflow, though division by 0 is trapped and flagged as an error. The operators and their precedence, asso ciativity, and values are the same as in the C language. The following list of operators is grouped into levels of equal-precedence operators. The levels are listed in order of decreasing precedence.
id++ id-- variable post-increment and post-decrement
++id --id variable pre-increment and pre-decrement
- + unary minus and plus
! ~ logical and bitwise negation
** exponentiation
* / % multiplication, division, remainder
+ - addition, subtraction
<> left and right bitwise shifts
=
comparison
== != equality and inequality
& bitwise AND
^ bitwise exclusive OR
| bitwise OR
&& logical AND
|| logical OR
expr?expr:expr
conditional operator
= *= /= %= += -= <>= &= ^= |=
assignment
expr1 , expr2
comma
Shell variables are allowed as operands; parameter expansion is performed before the expression is evaluated. Within an expression, shell variables may also be referenced by name without using the parameter expansion syntax. A shell variable that is null or unset evaluates to 0 when referenced by name without using the parameter expansion syntax. The value of a variable is evaluated as an arithmetic expression when it is ref erenced, or when a variable which has been given the integer attribute using declare -i is assigned a value. A null value evaluates to 0. A shell variable need not have its integer attribute turned on to be used in an expression.
Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers. A leading 0x or 0X denotes hexadecimal. Other wise, numbers take the form [base#]n, where base is a decimal number between 2 and 64 representing the arith metic base, and n is a number in that base. If base# is omitted, then base 10 is used. The digits greater than 9 are represented by the lowercase letters, the uppercase letters, @, and _, in that order. If base is less than or equal to 36, lowercase and uppercase letters may be used interchangeably to represent numbers between 10 and 35.