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+Episode: 1222
+Title: HPR1222: LiTS 027: mathematical commands
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1222/hpr1222.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:55:25
+
+---
+
+Welcome to Linux in the Shell episode 27.
+My name is Dan Washco, I'm your host today, and as always I'd like to thank Hacker Public
+Radio for hosting the website and the audio files.
+Please consider contributing to Hacker Public Radio or at the very least heading on over
+to HackerPublicRadio.org and listening to one of the wonderful shows that's always
+informative, put out every day by a fellow community member.
+Today we're going to talk about a couple of more mathematical-based applications, three
+programs we're going to talk about, Factor, Primes, and Sequence, and Arithmetic.
+I'm going to throw that one a bonus in there, but we'll get to that at the end.
+If you haven't listened or read the website, I suggest you head on over after this to
+watch the video and see the full write-up of these applications and the links to the bibliography.
+First program we're going to talk about is Factor.
+Factor is part of the core utilities package and it should already be installed on your
+system.
+What Factor does is you give it a number and it will form prime factorization or integer
+factorization upon that number and what that essentially is is it breaks a number, divides
+a number down into the smallest prime positive integers that are greater than one.
+For instance, if I were to do a factorization of the number two, factorization of that is
+two, simple enough.
+You usually omit the one in the output so it's just given, like three is three, but four
+is two, two, so two times two is four.
+You can't break two down any further, so you have two twos and then six would be two
+times three.
+You can't break it down any further.
+Eight on the other hand, if you were to do it by hand you could say eight equals two times
+four, four equals two times two, so three twos, two, two, two is the factor, factors of
+eight.
+That's three prime factors, two.
+And in nine is three times three, ten is two times five and so on.
+What factor does, it'll give you those values by just plugging in a number.
+So for instance, if you were to type in factors, six hundred thirty two, the output would
+be two, two, two, seventy nine.
+So if you multiply it all three, all four of those integers together, two times two times
+two times seventy nine, you get the value of six hundred thirty two.
+It's just a handy little utility if you need to get the factors of a positive integer.
+Now, you have to pass to it a positive integer, it won't accept floats, it won't accept
+negative numbers, so it just does positive integers.
+And also, there aren't any other options to the factor program, except for dash, dash
+version, which shows you the version of it and dash, dash, help, which pretty much tells
+you that the only option is version and gives a little info of what factor does.
+So that's part of the core utils.
+The other program I wanted to talk about is primes, primes does exactly what you might
+think it does.
+You pass it a starting number and an optional stopping number and it will give you all the
+prime numbers between those two numbers.
+So if you were to type in primes one to one thousand, it would go and list all the prime
+numbers between one and one thousand.
+Really simple.
+Now, if you do not pass it a stopping number, it does have a hard coded limit.
+And that limit is 4,294,9967,295.
+So that's the upper limit that it will go and it will probably take a long time to get
+there.
+If you're just letting the number cycle through and you want to stop it, just hit Ctrl
+C.
+Like factor, primes doesn't have any other options to it, so you know, you're not going
+to get anything else.
+Starting value for primes is zero or a positive integer.
+If you were to try and give a negative integer, it would fail or it doesn't work with floats
+either.
+So it just works with integers, just be aware of that.
+Now primes may not be installed on your system.
+It's part of the BSD games package.
+So if you really want to mess around with primes and another one that we're going to talk
+about today, arithmetic, you're going to have to get the BSD package, a BSD games package
+out of your package repository.
+Next one is going to have some options to it.
+It's called sequence, SEQ.
+Now what sequence is going to do is it's going to give you a, it's just going to output
+a sequence of numbers from a starting number to an optional ending number.
+So you probably do want to give an optional ending number or it's just going to give you
+the last digit as, if you only provided one number, it's going to give you a count
+up from one to that number that you provided.
+So sequence, SEQ, by default, starts at one, count up from one to whatever number you
+have passed to it.
+Now you can pass an optional starting number and also an incremental number.
+So for instance, if I wanted to get a list of numbers between 10 and 20, I would type
+in SEQ, space 10, space 20, and it will show me all the numbers between 10 and 20, including
+10 and 20.
+That's what it does.
+Now there's an option, there's a third option in there as a step number.
+Now be careful because if you just put in one value for the sequence, that's the ending
+number.
+It goes from one to that ending number.
+If you put in two numbers, that first number is treated as a starting number and the second
+number is treated as a stopping number.
+Now the starting number, if you're only providing a starting and stopping number, the starting
+number has to be smaller than the stopping number, otherwise you're not going to get any
+return value.
+It's just going to be null, nothing will happen.
+If I typed in sequence or SEQ, 2010, nothing will happen.
+Now you can pass an increment value, which would be the middle number.
+So that would be a third option, but be aware that when passing an increment number, it's
+starting number, increment, ending number.
+So starting at 10.5 and 20, those values, 10 would be the starting, 20 would be the stopping,
+10.5 would be the increment.
+So it would go 10, 10.5, 11, 11.5, 12, 12.5, so on.
+The increment number occurs between the starting and stopping number.
+So when there's three values in there, it treats the first entry as the second entry
+as the increment and the third entry as the stopping point.
+Now the increment could be a decrement.
+So in this case, I did 10, or I'm sorry, 2010 as the start and stop.
+If I were to put a negative one in there as the increment, which would actually be a decrement,
+it would count down from 20 to negative or to 10, one step, negative one.
+And as you noticed, I had said, as an example of the increment, 0.5, it works with floats
+and negative numbers.
+So you can do sequences with floats and negative numbers there.
+So pretty handy.
+For instance, if I were to do SEQ negative 10, 1, 10, it would count up from negative 10 all
+the way through to 10, it would include 0.
+Now unlike the other commands I had mentioned, this one does allow you some switches.
+The first switch we could talk about is dash S or dash S separator equals, and it will
+change the default separator between each number.
+The default separator is a new line character.
+But if you do dash S and comma, instead of a new line character, it would place a comma
+in between each number.
+You could put whatever you want in there.
+You don't have to put it in a double close.
+You could do sequence dash S, haha, 1, 10, and between each number would be, haha, be
+1, haha, 2, haha, 3, haha, and so on to 10, haha.
+Well, it wouldn't include haha after the 10 because that's the last number.
+So you can, if you ever needed to get a quick sequence of numbers, you could use this in
+the separator, and there you go, voila.
+Now there is a dash W or dash dash equal dash width, and that will print all the numbers
+with the same padding using zeros were necessary.
+So if I were to do a sequence of five to a hundred, it would show me, it would use zeros
+for padding.
+So I would get 0, 0, 5, 0, 0, 6, 0, 0, 7, and so on until I got the double digits and
+I get 0, 1, 0 for 10, 0, 2, 0 for 20, and then when I got to 100, it wouldn't pad.
+It would just be 1, 0, 0, and so on.
+And it would do padding with floats too, so whatever value you specify, or when you
+do equal width, whatever you specify, that's up to you.
+It would produce floats for zeros, or it would produce zeros to pad out the width of
+the number so they're all equal.
+Finally, there is a switch called dash f or dash dash format equals, and that allows
+you to specify the print f-style floating point conversion specification, which chances
+are you will never use this.
+But it's an option that you have, and what that does is you have to specify in a print
+f format, so by default it supports percent a, percent e, percent f, percent g.
+And what those are is percent a is hexadecimal floating point lowercase.
+Percent e is scientific notation lowercase, percent f is decimal floating point lowercase,
+and percent g is the shortest representation of percent e, which is scientific notation
+lowercase, or percent f, which is decimal floating point lowercase.
+Now, percent g is the default right there.
+So what that does is you're getting sequence of numbers in a decimal.
+If you were to provide dash a, it would give you a sequence of numbers in hexadecimal floating
+point.
+And that's not the same as hexadecimal that you're accustomed to.
+It's hexadecimal floating point, run it sequence dash f percent a, 1 to 100, and you'll
+see what it is.
+Now there's three other, or four other values there, and that's the same central values,
+but instead of lowercase a, e, and f, a, e, f, and g, it's uppercase, a, e, f, and g.
+And all that does is it switches them to uppercase.
+So percent capital a, or uppercase a is hexadecimal floating point, uppercase, percent capital
+e, scientific notation, uppercase, percent capital f, it's decimal floating point, uppercase,
+percent capital g, is lower, use shortest representation, representation of whether percent
+capital e, or percent capital f.
+That sequence in a nutshell, right there, is, if you, you can get more in depth with
+it, can print out in the print f style, that's covered in the info page a little more,
+but changes are going to never use it.
+So sequence allows you to print off a series of numbers.
+You specify at least one number, a float, whatever, and it'll count from one to that number.
+If you provide two numbers, that acts as a starting and stopping point, you provide three,
+it's a start, decrement, or increment, and stopping point.
+Now one other last thing I want to say, a caveat there, if you were to provide a starting
+point of like one, and an ending point of five, and increment by point three, it would
+not go all the way up to point five.
+What you would get is, if you did sequence 1.35, it would give you a value all the way
+up to 4.9, because the next entry in the sequence would actually be 5.2 and go above five.
+So it'll show you all the way up to the maximum value without going above the stopping point.
+So that's kind of a caveat there, be aware of that.
+So that covers the last three mathematically based applications that I found that struck
+my fancy that I thought I'd pass on to you.
+As a bonus, since we're talking about math, there's some then BST games was included, there's
+a little game in BST games called arithmetic.
+And with that is, it's a little quiz, arithmetic quiz.
+It presents you with math problems, addition, subtraction, division, or multiplication,
+and you have to solve them.
+You get graded on those for every 20 that you solve, you get graded, and it continues indefinitely.
+But if you want to stop, you hit Ctrl C, and it will grade you on how well you did.
+Now when you're presented with a problem, you have to get it right to continue on to the
+next one.
+If you get it wrong, it will ask you again until you get it right.
+By default, it will use numbers 0 through 10 and only addition and subtraction.
+Now there are switches to change this.
+The dash O switch allows you to specify the operators, and it can be one or all of, or
+any combination of the following, plus for addition, minus for subtraction, the forward
+slash for division, and the asterisk for multiplication, pretty much the symbols that you should
+be familiar with, that represent addition, subtraction, division, or multiplication.
+Now the default range, like I said, is 10, so 0 to 10.
+You can change that with the dash R option.
+What that will do is if you specify dash R 1000, that would allow the integers of between
+0 and 1000 to be used.
+On the basic starting level, you'll be asked questions like, was 5 plus 2, 5 minus 6,
+6 minus 5, all those sorts of things.
+But if you specify a dash R 1000, you'll be asked stuff like, what's 500 plus 600, what's
+500 plus 50, and so on, kind of like that.
+You have to be aware, when you're specifying a range, that the range for addition and
+the subterhand, the range for those operators, like a plus and multiplication, only addition
+and multiple, it's arithmetic, the way that it works, is that a model in my words
+there.
+But for addition and multiplication, the range applies to the addendants, so that is,
+or the terms or factors of the problem, so that is, you know, what you're adding together,
+not necessarily the sum, doesn't apply to the sum, and what you're multiplying, and
+not the product, okay.
+So it's, it's, range for 0 to 100 is what you're going to add together, what you're going
+to multiply.
+Now, for subtraction and division, it's different.
+That range applies to the divisor, which you're dividing with, or by, for division and
+the quotient, which is the, the result of the, the division problem, and for subtraction,
+it's the subterhand and the difference.
+So it's, whatever you're subtracting with, not from, you have the, the number you're
+subtracting from, how, what that value is, and the difference, which is the solution, or
+the answer of a subtraction problem, so that's what the dash r applies to in those values,
+they're a little different for multiplication and division.
+It's going to take some fun little application, if you want to quiz yourself, or you have
+a young child that's learning math, something to play around with, really simple.
+That is it for this episode of Linux in the shell, I hope you found it fun and informative,
+it's a little whimsical, fun mathematical applications, not necessarily completely practical
+on a day-to-day basis, but hey, it's a mathematics, if you ever want to get factors of a program,
+you have write it, or a number, you have write it, your, your fingertips there.
+I thank you, my name is Dan Waschko, head on over to Linux in the shell.org to listen
+to, or to read up the, on the full, write up these programs, see the links, and to listen
+or watch the video of their examples.
+Thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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