Simple command line calculator

Question

Had one years ago (on Win 3.1 or '95, I'm not sure). Anyways, it was a really simple program. Stood somewhere in PATH and enabled you to do something of a kind

calc 5 + 28.3*sqrt(12) 

and it spit out the result.

Anyone know of any such these days? Doesn't need to do anything fancy ... maybe it would just be nice if it had support for exponentials, but that's it.

Anyone?

p.s. Not interested in full blown solutions like Python or MATLAB.

Answer 1

A google search pops up a few command line calculators.

This one is written in C#

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/command_line_calculator.aspx

This one does graphs also. http://www.kotiposti.net/jjhalme/clcmain.htm

Answer 2

You might be able to use some flavour of awk to do it - the link suggests creating a function like calc(){ awk "BEGIN{ print $* }" ;}' and then using the new function withcalc "equation here"`- you can get a copy of awk from unxutils or use busybox.Either of them should be quite easily under 1 mb

For basic addition/subtraction/mulitiplication and division... try the set /a command - more details here and using the help option

Answer 3

Google itself will perform such calculations in the search box or here. Not sure what limitations it has though. Depends what you want to use this for.

Answer 4

This started as a comment, but it became too long, so I post it as an answer.

You say you don't want Python, but Python would be quick and complete, and to compare Python and MATLAB in "full-blown"-ity is quite harsh. I believe it would also fare well speed wise compared the the C# and Perl suggestions among the comments and answers.

I use the one-liner:

python -ic "from __future__ import division; from math import *;"

which I've bound to a keyboard shortcut which opens a terminal with this command, which gives me a lightning-fast competent calculator with exp(), sqrt(), sin(), log(), pi, e, etc.

If you just want a "calc 5+7" variant, the *nix variete would be:

python -c "from __future__ import division; from math import *; print $*"

and on Windows you probably just need to replace $* with %*.

from __future__ import division makes division use floating point instead of integer division as default, which is expected of a calculator. This is not needed if one uses Python 3 (which is what the __future__ part means).

from math import * imports all math functions into the main namespace, so you can do sin(2*pi) instead of math.sin(2*pi).

---

As an encore: to have a script that can be started in either interactive or direct mode:

#!/bin/sh
if [ ${#} = 0 ]; then
    python -ic "from __future__ import division; from math import *;"
else
    python -c "from __future__ import division; from math import *; print ${*};"
fi

(most probably trivially converted to Windows).