bash: sum a list of numbers

11th Sep, 2026 - programming bash

I had some output from a command where I wanted to extract a number from each line and get the total across all lines.

Each line in the file looks roughly like this: (string) "somedata": (int) 13,.

I first set out by extracting the number using awk:

$ awk '{gsub(/,/, "", $NF); print $NF}' /tmp/data.txt
...
12
173
3
14
86
...

Now that I had a list of numbers, I just needed to add them up! bc is the tool to do this but I first needed to format it into a mathematical expression for bc to parse. This is where the paste command came in! It takes lines as input and lets you replace the newline character with another character, in my case +.

$ awk '{gsub(/,/, "", $NF); print $NF}' /tmp/data.txt | paste -sd+ -
...+12+173+3+14+86+...

Perfect! Now I could just pipe it to bc and get the output I was after!

$ awk '{gsub(/,/, "", $NF); print $NF}' /tmp/data.txt | paste -sd+ - | bc
20798