I have an array of floats in Bash:
For example:
array(1.0002, 1.00232, 1.3222, ....)
I want to find the maximum and the minimum element of the array using Bash. The problem with this is that I have float elements that are not quite supported in Bash.
I have tried for example:
IFS=$'\n'
echo "${ar[*]}" | sort -nr | head -n1
But it does not work for floats.
What is the best way to do this?
There are probably many ways and I don't claim the two following are "the best".
You could use a calculator that supports floats, like bc, for instance:
max="${array[0]}"
min="${array[0]}"
for v in "${a[@]}"; do
max=$(echo "if($v>$max) $v else $max" | bc)
min=$(echo "if($v<$min) $v else $min" | bc)
done
echo "max=$max"
echo "min=$min"
awk also supports floats, so the following would do the same:
printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}" | \
awk '$1>max||NR==1 {max=$1}
$1<min||NR==1 {min=$1}
END {print "max=" max; print "min=" min}'
bc installed? Do you have non-numeric values in your array?bc error message. What version of bc do you have (what is the output of bc --version)?$array=(1.0002 1.00232 1.3222)
$printf "%s\n" "${array[@]}" | sort -rn | head -n1
1.3222
$ printf "%s\n" "${array[@]}" | sort -rn | tail -n1
1.0002
#Tried with %s or %f
