calc command line tool always becomes interactive

Question

For some reason calc always becomes interactive (as if I had specified -i, or not specified an expression at all). I have to press CTRL-C multiple times to exit.

~ calc 5+4
    9
^C
[Abort level 1]
^C
[Abort level 2]
^C
[Abort level 3]
^C
ABORT
~ 

It worked fine on my old mac. I installed it using brew (on both machines), and reinstalling calc doesnt help. What could be the reason?

Edit: I've tried starting a clean bash shell, I've checked aliases, and I've tried to use -q -e to ignore environment and configuration files. None of these things have helped.

~ type -a calc
calc is /usr/local/bin/calc

~ calc -q -e 5+4 does not change the behaviour.

~ env -i bash --noprofile --norc
bash-3.2$ calc 5+4

doesnt help either.

~ ls -l /usr/local/bin/calc
lrwxr-xr-x  1 lafp  admin  34 Feb 28 14:43 /usr/local/bin/calc -> ../Cellar/calc/2.12.7.1_1/bin/calc`

I did find something that does help. Switching to a different user! (in this case root).

~ sudo su
root@... calc 5+4
    9
root@...

Answer 1

Option 1:

On zsh, calc is a function. You may try that instead of /usr/local/bin/calc

$ which calc
calc () {
    awk "BEGIN{ print $* }"
}

Option 2: Try running command with absolute path. /usr/local/bin/calc 5+4 or \calc 5+4. If \calc worked for you then most probably you have set an alias for calc.

Answer 2

I think I figured it out: the problem was rvm.

In my .bash_profile I had [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function*

And it stayed loaded even when starting a new bash or clearing environment variables, because env -i does not clear functions, only variables.

Needless to say I will try to avoid rvm in the future... it registers hundreds of functions. Scary.

Thanks for all the help!