How to compare two floating point numbers in Bash?

Question

I am trying hard to compare two floating point numbers within a bash script. I have to variables, e.g.

let num1=3.17648e-22
let num2=1.5

No

Answer 1

This script may help where I'm checking if installed grails version is greater than minimum required. Hope it helps.

#!/bin/bash                                                                                         

min=1.4                                                                                             
current=`echo $(grails --version | head -n 2 | awk '{print $NF}' | cut -c 1-3)`                         

if [ 1 -eq `echo "${current} < ${min}" | bc` ]                                                          
then                                                                                                
    echo "yo, you have older version of grails."                                                   
else                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    echo "Hurray, you have the latest version" 
fi

Answer 2

I was posting this as an answer to https://stackoverflow.com/a/56415379/1745001 when it got closed as a dup of this question so here it is as it applies here too:

For simplicity and clarity just use awk for the calculations as it's a standard UNIX tool and so just as likely to be present as bc and much easier to work with syntactically.

For this question:

$ cat tst.sh
#!/bin/bash

num1=3.17648e-22
num2=1.5

awk -v num1="$num1" -v num2="$num2" '
BEGIN {
    print "num1", (num1 < num2 ? "<" : ">="), "num2"
}
'

$ ./tst.sh
num1 < num2

and for that other question that was closed as a dup of this one:

$ cat tst.sh
#!/bin/bash

read -p "Operator: " operator
read -p "First number: " ch1
read -p "Second number: " ch2

awk -v ch1="$ch1" -v ch2="$ch2" -v op="$operator" '
BEGIN {
    if ( ( op == "/" ) && ( ch2 == 0 ) ) {
        print "Nope..."
    }
    else {
        print ch1 '"$operator"' ch2
    }
}
'

$ ./tst.sh
Operator: /
First number: 4.5
Second number: 2
2.25

$ ./tst.sh
Operator: /
First number: 4.5
Second number: 0
Nope...

Answer 3

How about this? =D

VAL_TO_CHECK="1.00001"
if [ $(awk '{printf($1 >= $2) ? 1 : 0}' <<<" $VAL_TO_CHECK 1 ") -eq 1 ] ; then
    echo "$VAL_TO_CHECK >= 1"
else
    echo "$VAL_TO_CHECK < 1"
fi

Answer 4

please check the below edited code:-

#!/bin/bash

export num1=(3.17648*e-22)
export num2=1.5

st=$((`echo "$num1 < $num2"| bc`))
if [ $st -eq 1 ]
  then
    echo -e "$num1 < $num2"
  else
    echo -e "$num1 >= $num2"
fi

this works well.

Answer 5

Using bashj (https://sourceforge.net/projects/bashj/ ), a bash mutant with java support, you just write (and it IS easy to read):

#!/usr/bin/bashj

#!java
static int doubleCompare(double a,double b) {return((a>b) ? 1 : (a<b) ? -1 : 0);}

#!bashj
num1=3.17648e-22
num2=1.5
comp=j.doubleCompare($num1,$num2)
if [ $comp == 0 ] ; then echo "Equal" ; fi
if [ $comp == 1 ] ; then echo "$num1 > $num2" ; fi
if [ $comp == -1 ] ; then echo "$num2 > $num1" ; fi

Of course bashj bash/java hybridation offers much more...