How to coerce AWK to evaluate string as math expression?

Question

Is there a way to evaluate a string as a math expression in awk?

balter@spectre3:~$ echo \"sin(0.3) 0.3\" | awk \'{print $1,sin($2)}\'
sin(0.3) 0.29552
         


        

Answer 1

You can try Perl as it has eval() function.

$  echo "sin(0.3)" | perl -ne ' print eval '
0.29552020666134
$

For the given input,

$ echo "sin(0.3) 0.3" | perl -ne ' /(\S+)\s+(\S+)/ and print eval($1), " ", $2 '
0.29552020666134 0.3
$