Stephane CHAZELAS wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > [...] > > Your expressions above are overflowing the value of your system's > > maximum integer size. You can read the system's maximum integer size > > using getconf. > > > > $ getconf INT_MAX > > 2147483647 > [...] > > POSIX requires that arithmetic expansion be using at least > signed longs, so getconf INT_MAX wouldn't necessarily be > correct.
Ah... I didn't know that. Thank you for that correction. Unfortunately LONG_MAX is not available from getconf. But on my system in limits.h LONG_MAX is defined as 9223372036854775807 and the at least one of the previous example calculations was: echo $((72057594037927936*128)) which according to bc works out to be: 9223372036854775808 Bob