P.S., also perhaps eliminate the boring steps from the example, using instead $ perl -we 'for ($i = 0.05; $i < 1.05; $i += 0.10) { printf "%.1f ",$i}' 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0