CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellunixbc
crazysantaclaus
crazysantaclaus

Reputation: 623

use shell pipe output as calculator input

I'm having issues to use the output of a pipe such as

ls *.gz | wc -l / 2 | bc

immidiately as input to a shell calculator tool such as bc. I'm not sure how to put the quotation marks or if this is possible at all without assigning a variable?

The background is that in the folder each two files belong together, so I simply want to divide the total number of files by 2.

There might be an obvious solution but I could not find it so far...

I'm using bash if that is important?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1524

Answers (1)

CS Pei
CS Pei

Reputation: 11047

As mentioned by Charles that parsing ls is not a good practice but anyway if you want to do that, you can try

 ls *.gz |wc -l | xargs echo "0.5*" | bc

Upvotes: 2

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