First things first, as this recipe alluded to—we noticed that the Bash shell doesn't like decimal numbers with fractions or even non-whole numbers. Wait, math!? Unfortunately, we can't hide all the details, but in programming, there are a couple of concepts that you should be aware of:
- Signed and unsigned numbers
- Floats, doubles, and integers
The first concept is fairly simple—current computers are binary, which means they compute using zeros (0) and ones (1). This means that they work in powers of 2^. Without getting into a lesson about basic computer science, if you see a value (datatype) that is an int (integer) and that it is a 32 bit number, this means that the maximum value if it begins at 0 is 4,294,967,295 in decimal ...
