\nAm I a geek? In my home town, I probably qualify. However, in a large centre, I’d be “geek-lite” at best. I do program computers, but it’s not my profession. My degree is in math, not comp-sci. Somehow, the scientists – especially those in computer science – have first right to geekness.<\/p>\n
Likely, one trait counting against my geekness is the fact that I don’t use the calculator app on the computer. Even when I’m at the computer, I use a hand-held calculator to crunch numbers.<\/p>\n
But what, I asked myself today, if I could calculate from the terminal? That would appeal. Off I went to find out about it.<\/p>\n
What I found was the website thegeekstuff.com<\/a>. What an exciting resource it is! Sasikala has an article there about using awk<\/strong> to do math from the command line. Here are couple of tasty examples:<\/p>\n 1)In the Linux terminal, the command<\/p>\n awk ‘BEGIN{print sqrt(78)}’<\/span><\/p>\n will give the square root of 78:<\/p>\n 8.83176<\/span><\/p>\n 2)In the Linux terminal, the command<\/p>\n awk ‘BEGIN{print log(14)}’<\/span><\/p>\n will give the natural log<\/em> of 14 (aka, ln14<\/em>):<\/p>\n 2.63906<\/span><\/p>\n In life, we all need to make peace with some realities. I have to face the fact that I’m probably too old to ever reach true geekness. Yet, I’m not giving up. <\/p>\n I’m anxious to talk more about awk<\/strong> scripting:)<\/p>\n