looking for start-menu commandline argument calculator

December 13, 2010 3:46 PM

Command-line calculator: I used to have a calculator program I put in c:\windows\system that took arguments, so I could type "c 5+2" into the start menu on W7 and a popup with the answer (7) would appear. Anyone know the name? Not quite a command-line calculator, since I want to pass in arguments and get a returned single value via popup.
posted by lrodman to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Maybe not exactly what you previously had, but Launchy can sort of do this.
posted by kenbennedy at 4:08 PM on December 13, 2010

You can do this in most browsers by assigning a browser bookmark to a Google search and then assigning a keyword search to that bookmark. For example, you could type "g 5+2" or "c 5+2" in the address field of the browser and it would return a Google search for 5+2 which automatically triggers Google's calculator function. You could overkill it by following the same procedure for Wolfram Alpha.
posted by proj at 4:42 PM on December 13, 2010

Not quite what you're looking for, but I've got the default search engine in my web-browser set to Google. It pushes simple math to Google Calculator (description) and returns the answer, generally as the first result.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 4:44 PM on December 13, 2010

This might be more than you are interested in, but you could install python, and write a one line script to return the results of your calculation.

Although getting into popups is a bit past my level of experience at this point. :)
posted by AltReality at 4:51 PM on December 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: yup, I love gcal, and WR is ok too. I used to use launchy before w7 as well. Still, not exactly what I was looking for - it's like a freeware app something like 30-40kb, single EXE, and it wasn't named "c", I just renamed it.
posted by lrodman at 4:57 PM on December 13, 2010

You can do this on a mac using quicksilver. Maybe one of the replacements for PC's have similar functionality?
posted by bessel functions seem unnecessarily complicated at 5:01 PM on December 13, 2010

I am not a Windows user, but perhaps the built-in calculator in Windows 7 can take command line arguments? Though that would probably require starting up the GUI calculator to see the result. A quick Python script may actually be your best bet if you are dead set on command-line with minimal output.
posted by proj at 5:08 PM on December 13, 2010