Hi Markhazy, first I guess this isn't the right place, but well, the damage is done :)
TLTR; you have a cdiv code that gives in output two numbers, real and the imaginary part you want to store them into bash variables. so, why can't you do a simple bash script for doing this? I see a trivial solution: get the return of the cvid program and store in a temp variable. then split it. user@user:-$ A=-1 user@user:-$ B=6 "cdiv $A 5 $B 0" -0.16667 + j0.8333 so I would do something like TEMP=`cdiv $A 5 $B 0` or TEMP=$(cdiv $A 5 $B 0) note the special "`" character AC=$(echo $TEMP | cut -d "+" -f 1) ACIM=$(echo $TEMP | cut -d "+" -f 2) if you want to strip the j ACIM=$(echo $TEMP | cut -d "+" -f 2 | cut -d "j" -f 2) man cut man echo can help you :) (of course this is a bad solution, a nicer solution might be to save the output in a file and parte is, directly use some bash command to calculate that, e.g. some bc scripting [1] or even make your cdiv communicate with sockets, dbus or just by printing output on more lines, to avoid the need to parse the output with bash) [1] http://phodd.net/gnu-bc/code/complex.bc HTH, even if I'm not sure I understood the question. cheers, G.