Preventing Asterisk Expansion in Function Params in Bourne Shell Script

[LuckY]

I'm writing a shell script in which I am performing floating point calculations. I cannot use `expr` since it does not support real numbers, so I decided to write/use a function to use `bc` like this:

math(){
  echo $1 | bc -l
}

result=`math "2.4 * 6.8"`

The problem is that the asterisk is expanded to all filenames in the current directory when it is passed to math(). Escaping it (\*) does not help because then `bc` won't accept the string.

Have you any ideas besides a hack in which I use escapes then remove them in math()? That may be the route I'll be forced to take, but I'd prefer something cleaner.

[LuckY]

Wow. Clearly I overlooked something quite elementary. Enclosing $1 in quotes prevents using the asterisk as a wildcard:

math(){
  echo "$1" | bc -l
}

Don't you hate when you try for hours to fix something then realize how slight your oversight was?