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

If you have R, you can use:

> ... | Rscript -e 'print(sum(scan("stdin")));'
Read 4 items
[1] 2232320

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Since I'm comfortable with R, I actually have several aliases for things like this so I can use them in bash without having to remember this syntax. For instance:

alias Rsum=$'Rscript -e \'print(sum(scan("stdin")));\''

which let's me do

> ... | Rsum
Read 4 items
[1] 2232320

Inspiration: Is there a way to get the min, max, median, and average of a list of numbers in a single command?