Perform floating point arithmetic in shell script variable definitions [duplicate]

Question

I understand bash and some other interpreters only perform arithmetic for integers. In the following for loop, how can I accomplish this? I've read that bc can be used but am not sure how to use bc in this situation.

total=0
for number in `cat /path/to/file`; do
        total=$(($total+$number))
done
average=$(($total/10))
echo Average is $average

file:

1.143362
1.193994
1.210489
1.210540
1.227611
1.243496
1.260872
1.276752
1.294121
1.427371

Answer 1

You may not want to use bc for this. Perhaps awk would work better:

awk '{sum+=$1};END{print sum/NR}' /path/to/file

Answer 2

As tagged bash, here is a bash 4.0 alternative to choroba's answer, to avoid wc and sed:

bash-4.2$ mapfile -t a < file

bash-4.2$ (IFS='+'; echo "(${a[*]})/${#a[@]}") | bc -l
1.24886080000000000000

Answer 3

I usually use bc for floating point arithmetics:

file=1.txt
echo '('$(<$file)')/'$(wc -l < $file) | sed 's/ /+/g' | bc -l

Answer 4

term=0
file=input
for number in `cat "$file"`; do
        term="${term}+${number}"
done
total="$(echo "$term" | bc -l)"
average="$(echo "${total}/10" | bc -l)"
average="$(echo "$average" | sed -e 's/^\(.*\..*[^0]\)0*/\1/' -e p)"
echo "Total: ${total}"
echo "Average: ${average}"