Whiile reading through Planet Sun I stumbled across Chris Gerhard’s base conversion post. I replied with an alternate solution using bc(1), which I have used extensively through the years. bc(1) is a command line calculator that can convert between bases when the “ibase” and “obase” options are used. The following example shows how to convert a base 10 number to it’s hexidecimal equivalent:
$ bc
obase=16
12345677
BC614D
We can also use bc to convert a hexidecimal value to decimal:
$ bc
ibase=16
FF
255
This gets even better! We can convert a hexidecimal value to binary:
$ bc
ibase=16
obase=2
FF
11111111
I really really like bc (and dc)!