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Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

why not pipe the input through a few more commands? :-P

    bc -l -e "(2/3) * 3 - 2"

I don't know which system you're on, but GNU bc does not support this flag.

On the other hand, bash and zsh support this:

  bc -l <<<'(2/3) * 3 - 2'

edit: neither does busybox.

Huh. I assumed I was on standard versions of these kind of really old utilities. But you're on to something:

    bc -v
    bc 4.0.2
    Copyright (c) 2018-2021 Gavin D. Howard and contributors
    Report bugs at: https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc

Like this?

$ echo "(2/3)*3-2" | bc -l > /dev/null && echo "0"

First prize would be if you could write a pipe which meaningfully combines bc, cc, dc, fc, nc and wc. No other commands allowed.