Dan Nelson wrote: > In the last episode (Sep 30), Andrew said: > > I'm counting traffic with ipfw and shell scripts. Is there a way to > > use more than 32-bit numbers in shell arithmetic? > > POSIX only requires "signed long" support in the shell, but FreeBSD's > expr command has a -e flag that will let it do 64-bit math: > > $ echo $(( 65536*65536 )) > 0 > $ echo $(expr 65536 "*" 65536) > 0 > $ echo $(expr -e 65536 "*" 65536) > 4294967296 > > bash, ksh93 (but not pdksh), and zsh's shell arithmetic are all 64-bit, > also.
Thanks! I haven't thought about using expr. How come that my expr(1) manpage has nothing to say about -e option? In fact my expr(1) does not accept it. I have FreeBSD 4.10. I've just looked into a current manpage from www.freebsd.org, and it says something about 4.x compatibility. What is the best way to go if I need to write scripts now, but I'm planning to switch to 5.x later? Can I upgrade expr(1) now? If not, what should I do? Thanks again and regards, Andrew P. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"