Question

How to evaluate arithmetic expression passed as argument in awk?

I have this in a file.

1*2*3
1+2*3

awk should output 6, 7, when this file is passed in.

Answer 1

awk(1) is the wrong tool as it doesn’t have an eval() function. I suggest modifying the file into input for bc(1) or using shell arithmetic expansion:

while read expr; do
    echo "$(($expr))"
done < file