BASH: how to perform arithmetic on numbers in a pipe

Question

I am getting a stream of numbers in a pipe, and would like to perform some operations before passing them on to the next section, but I\'m a little lost about how I would go

Answer 1

Using awk is another solution, which also works with floats

echo "1 2 3 4 5" | xargs -n1 | awk '{print $1^2}' | xargs

or use a loop

for x in 1 2 3 4 5; do echo $((x**2)); done | xargs
for x in $(echo "1 2 3 4 5"); do echo $x^2 | bc; done | xargs # alternative solution
for x in $(seq 5); do python -c "print($x**2)"; done | xargs  # alternative solution but slower than the above
# or make it neat by defining a function to do basic math in bash, e.g.:
calc() { awk "BEGIN{print $*}"; } 
for x in $(seq 5); do calc $x^2; done | xargs