bc: command not found

bc is a calculator scripting language. Scripts in bc can be executed with the bc command. Imagine a test.bc file contains the following code:

scale = 2;
(10.0*2+2)/7;

That means you can run bc like this:

$ cat test.bc | bc
3.14

bc can do far more than just divide two numbers. It’s a fully-fledged scripting language on its own and you can do arbitrarily complex things with a bc script. A bc script might be the ending point of a pipeline of data, where the data files are initially massaged into a stream of data rows, and then a bc script is used to compute the values we’re looking for.

You can omit the copyright messages displayed while running bc using the “-q” option with it.

$ bc –q
2 + 2
4
quit

The ability to take standard input means we can use documents, strings, and pipes to pass scripts. This is a here string example:

$ bc <<< "2+2"
4

If you get an error as shown below while executing the bc command:

bc: command not found

you may try installing the bc package as shown below as per your choice of distribution.

The bash calculator recognizes these:

• Numbers (both integer and floating point)
• Variables (both simple variables and arrays)
• Comments (lines starting with a pound sign or the C language /* */ pair)
• Expressions
• Programming statements (such as if-then statements)
• Functions