Using bc in bash script

[Alexander Haderer]

At 11:35 14.08.2003 -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote:
>At 2003-08-14T16:08:21Z, "Charles Howse" <chowse at charter.net> writes:
>
> > Can I refine it to give me something like: .784 seconds?
>
>Use "bc -l" instead of bc.  That should do it.

Yes, but not in the context mentioned before:

 > > > Start_time=`date +%s` # Seconds past midnight at start of script
 > > > [ do lots of stuff ]
 > > > End_time=`date +%s`   # Seconds past midnight at end of script

et=`echo "$end_time - $start_time" | bc -l`

Here bc -l will not really help, because date +%s returns whole seconds :-(

BTW: %s are seconds since epoch

Alexander