bash floating point arithmetic

Bash supports arithmetic but it does not support floating point arithmetic.

For example

bash$ echo $((1 + 1))
2

bash $ echo $((1 + 1.1))
-bash: 1 + 1.1: syntax error in expression (error token is ".1")

Bash will treat the floating point number as a string.

However, the utility bc does handle floating point arithmetic and can
be called from within bash scripts.

Here we call it from the command line:

bash$ echo "1+1" | bc
2

bash$ echo "1+1.1" | bc
2.1