Multiplication on command line terminal

Question

I\'m using a serial terminal to provide input into our lab experiment. I found that using

$ echo \"5X5\"

just returns a string of \"

Answer 1

A simple shell function (no sed needed) should do the trick of interpreting '5X5'

$ function calc { bc -l <<< ${@//[xX]/*}; };
$ calc 5X5
25
$ calc 5x5
25
$ calc '5*5'
25

Answer 2

I use this function which uses bc and thus supports floating point calculations:

c () { 
    local a
    (( $# > 0 )) && a="$@" || read -r -p "calc: " a
    bc -l <<< "$a"
}

Example:

$ c '5*5'
25
$ c 5/5
1.00000000000000000000
$ c 3.4/7.9
.43037974683544303797

Bash's arithmetic expansion doesn't support floats (but Korn shell and zsh do).

Example:

$ ksh -c 'echo "$((3.0 / 4))"'
0.75