Tip: Calculate Pi on Pi Day

[Hallvor]

14th of March is Pi Day. It is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). If you want to calculate Pi, you can do it yourself with the following command, where the number after = is the number of decimals you want to calculate:

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$ echo "scale=1000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l

If you want to calculate large amounts of data, I recommend saving the output to a text file. It can be done like this:

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$ echo "scale=1000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l > pi.txt

[AR15USR]

Hey pretty cool, thanks for sharing..

Curious why the output wraps lines?

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3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\
81640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058\
22317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644\
28810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610\

[AR15USR]

Well this got me thinking.... Found a program called 'y-cruncher' and just calculated pi to 500 million digits Fun..

[Hallvor]

I don't know why it does that...

That is a great tip! It was very fast.

[Bloom]

BC uses a default line length of 70 characters and will "wrap' when that is reached.
Export BC_LINE_LENGTH=0 if you don't want that. Example:

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export BC_LINE_LENGTH=0
echo "scale=1000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l

[AR15USR]

BC uses a default line length of 70 characters and will "wrap' when that is reached.
Export BC_LINE_LENGTH=0 if you don't want that. Example:

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export BC_LINE_LENGTH=0
echo "scale=1000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l

Works great, thanks!