Add up a column of numbers at the Unix shell

Question

Given a list of files in files.txt, I can get a list of their sizes like this:

cat files.txt | xargs ls -l | cut -c 23-30

which pr

Answer 1

You can use the following script if you just want to use shell scripting without awk or other interpreters:

#!/bin/bash

total=0

for number in `cat files.txt | xargs ls -l | cut -c 23-30`; do
   let total=$total+$number
done

echo $total