Hi there I'm new to performing calculations using awk or some such tool withi a UNIX shell script. I have a formula which I need to calculate. I've done it using bc but it involves breaking down the formula and performing 8 calculations which I'm sure isn't the best way to do this! There are input values to the formula which I have assigned to A, B, C, D, E and F in the script. The formula is as follows: Square root of (A-D)^2 + (B-E)^2 + (C-F)^2 where (A-D)^2 equals A-D squared. BTW all or some of A-F may have negative values! It doesn't necessarily have to be performed using awk but the faster the better as I'll have a lot of calculations to do! Thanks for any assistance. Simon

Here is an awk solution, but you might be better off embeeding your bc solution in a script. I think bc probably has a smaller foot print than awk: #!/bin/ksh A=63 D=-1 B=51 E=2 C=89 F=8 # should be 24 echo ""|awk '{ print sqrt(A-D)+sqrt(B-E)+sqrt(C-F) }' A=$A D=$D B=$B E=$E C=$C F=$F