to get more digits of precision after the decimal point (see Wikipedia page).
Excerpt:
[ bc first appeared in Version 6 Unix in 1975 and was written by Robert Morris and Lorinda Cherry of Bell Labs. bc was preceded by dc, an earlier arbitrary-precision calculator written by the same authors. dc could do arbitrary-precision calculations, but its reverse Polish notation (RPN) syntax was inconvenient for users, and therefore bc was written as a front-end to dc. bc was a very simple compiler (a single yacc source file with a few hundred lines), which converted the new, C-like, bc syntax into dc's postfix notation and piped the results through dc. ]
Note that GNU bc is no longer a front-end to dc:
[ In 1991, POSIX rigorously defined and standardized bc. Two implementations of this standard survive today: The first is the traditional Unix implementation, a front-end to dc, which survives in Unix and Plan 9 systems. The second is the free software GNU bc, first released in 1991 by Philip A. Nelson. The GNU implementation has numerous extensions beyond the POSIX standard and is no longer a front-end to dc (it is a bytecode interpreter). ]
Also, you can pipe the standard output of any other (filter) command into bc, and likewise, pipe bc's output to any other filter.
$ man bc
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bc_(programming_language)
I normally invoke it with:
$ bc -l
to get more digits of precision after the decimal point (see Wikipedia page).
Excerpt:
[ bc first appeared in Version 6 Unix in 1975 and was written by Robert Morris and Lorinda Cherry of Bell Labs. bc was preceded by dc, an earlier arbitrary-precision calculator written by the same authors. dc could do arbitrary-precision calculations, but its reverse Polish notation (RPN) syntax was inconvenient for users, and therefore bc was written as a front-end to dc. bc was a very simple compiler (a single yacc source file with a few hundred lines), which converted the new, C-like, bc syntax into dc's postfix notation and piped the results through dc. ]
Note that GNU bc is no longer a front-end to dc:
[ In 1991, POSIX rigorously defined and standardized bc. Two implementations of this standard survive today: The first is the traditional Unix implementation, a front-end to dc, which survives in Unix and Plan 9 systems. The second is the free software GNU bc, first released in 1991 by Philip A. Nelson. The GNU implementation has numerous extensions beyond the POSIX standard and is no longer a front-end to dc (it is a bytecode interpreter). ]
Also, you can pipe the standard output of any other (filter) command into bc, and likewise, pipe bc's output to any other filter.