On Wed, September 11, 2013 13:51, Barry Lake wrote:

>
> If you'd like to clean this up a bit -- and I'd highly recommend
> doing so if you're going to use this technique in more than a
> single location -- then you could make a few small improvements to
> enhance readability.
>
> First, note that the quotes inside the shell...
>
>   echo "31.1 * 4.7" | bc
>
> ...are required only in order to prevent the shell from "globbing"
> (that is, performing wildcard expansion on) the asterisk "*". You
> can also prevent globbing by escaping the asterisk, which removes
> the need for the embedded quotes:
>
>   /SYS/PUB $ echo "31.1 * 4.7" | bc
>   146.1
>   /SYS/PUB $ echo 31.1 \* 4.7 | bc
>   146.1
>
> That would make your XEQ command at the CI a bit cleaner:

Thank you again.  I have no requirement for anything but an integer value in
the application that prompted this thread.  It is just that the intermediate
calculations do require decimal fractions.  And this is only ever going to be
used in one place inside a single JOB STREAM file as far as I can predict.


Thanks again.

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