BC and DC calculators missing? Nope!

[Member PDP-8]

Missing the bc or dc calculators to run stand-alone or in a pipe, and don’t feel like going online to download them? Don’t worry – busybox is on board already to help. At least with 19.x of antiX and Debian’s more updated busybox version than in the past.

I run them stand-alone, especially on a bare CORE environment. Typically like this in a pipe hardcoded numerically or with variables:

echo 'scale=3; (8.905 - 2.93378)/1' | busybox bc

I think this is an *excellent* decision on the antiX dev’s part – those that truly need it can take advantage of BB without having to duplicate the effort for the small minority of those of us that still use and dig these calculators. 🙂

Historical note: dc (rpn version) was the first “app” on Unix V1 or so at ATT.

[Member PDP-8]

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In fact, I like them so much I made soft-links (as root) in the /bin directory to busybox:

ln -s busybox bc
ln -s busybox dc

Heck, I even like the lightweight Busybox VI editor, although I still want VIM around just in case. I’ll use vi for the Busybox version, and vim for the heavyweight stuff.

Again, in the /bin directory as root:

mv vi vim
ln -s busybox vi

Ah, feel better now. 🙂

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