Old news, I know. But still nice to know. awk "BEGIN { print $* ; }" echo "scale=5; $1" | bc -l perl -e "print $1";echo Prepend any of these lines with #!/bin/bash, call it, well, calc, and invoke your new calculator with 'calc 2+2'. PS: No, the 'run command' utility of KDE can't compete with these one-liners. But katapult can.