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

In my opinion, the simplest solution to this is "expr" unix command:

s=0; 
for i in `cat files.txt | xargs ls -l | cut -c 23-30`
do
   s=`expr $s + $i`
done
echo $s