Hi, this is Sandra Henry-Stocker, author of the “Unix as a Second Language” blog on NetworkWorld.
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the pi command. It’s probably not one that you will need very often but, if you need to calculate pi to some arbitrary number of digits, you’ll probably be surprised at how easy this can be.
Without any arguments, the pi command will spit out the first 100 digits:
If you want to see only 10 or a million digits, supply that number as an argument. For a million digits, you might have to wait a few seconds for your answer. We’ll time it to see a measure of how long it takes.
Calculating a billion digits should take about 1,000 times as long (maybe an hour?), so you might not want to do that unless you’re very patient.
If you want to try for a world record, you will have to calculate more than 31.4 trillion digits to beat the record set in 2019 by a Google cloud developer (Emma Haruka Iwao). I’m assuming. She wasn’t using the pi command and, hopefully, found a more efficient approach.
That’s your Linux tip for the pi command. I hope you math enthusiasts are excited and will share your new favorite command every March 14th (Pi Day).
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