Re: summation in dc

[Russ Allbery]

Mike Maxwell <maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu> writes:

> A frequent task I have is to sum a series of numbers.  The 'dc' utility
> is a nice tool, but I don't see any obvious way of using it to sum a
> list of arbitrary length.  Well, I guess I could use wc -l to find out
> how many numbers I was going to sum, then keep decrementing that, but
> that seems clumsy...

> I can read the numbers into dc, then keep hitting the "+" key until I
> get a "stack empty" error, then do "p".  But that also seems clumsy, and
> besides, I want this to run automatically, without keystrokes, or me
> waiting to see the error msg.

> Maybe there's a way of doing this with macros in dc?  Or in bc?  Or in
> some other tool?  If the latter, it needs to be s.t. readily available,
> as I want it to work in several different environments (CygWin, Linux,
> FreeBSD).

Sounds like you're looking for something like:

    awk '{ total += $1 } END { print total }' file

where file contains all your numbers, one per line.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>