Compare floating point variables in BASH

As it turns out the if statement in bash isn’t as friendly towards floating point variables as it is for integer and string variables.

First of all the -gt and -lt switches don’t work.Even the unary operators >,<, etc. don’t work. The only way is to do a comparison between the floating point variables using bc and using the logical outout as a comparison string.

a=11.5; b=11.3
compare_result=`echo "$a >$b" | bc`
 if [ $compare_result -gt 0 ]; then
 echo $a
else
echo $b
 fi