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

Pipe to gawk:

 cat files.txt | xargs ls -l | cut -c 23-30 | gawk 'BEGIN { sum = 0 } // { sum = sum + $0 } END { print sum }'