title: use shell pipe output as calculator input
body: <p>I'm having issues to use the output of a pipe such as </p>
  
  <p><code>ls *.gz | wc -l / 2 | bc</code> </p>
  
  <p>immidiately as input to a shell calculator tool such as <code>bc</code>. I'm not sure how to put the quotation marks or if this is possible at all without assigning a variable?</p>
  
  <p>The background is that in the folder each two files belong together, so I simply want to divide the total number of files by 2.</p>
  
  <p>There might be an obvious solution but I could not find it so far...</p>
  
  <p>I'm using <code>bash</code> if that is important?</p>