awk sum examples

Here are some awk examples to sum an integer column from a file or stdin (standard input) stream.

Data used in these examples

1
2
badval
4

Awk sum example on command line

Lines with invalid numbers are treated as 0. To sum values from stdin use the following command:

cat data1.txt | awk '{ S+=$1} END {print S}'

7

To sum values from file use the following command:

awk '{ S+=$1} END {print S}' data1.txt

7

Bash alias for awk sum code

Put the following line in your ~/.bash_profile

alias mysum="awk '{ S+=\$1} END {print S}'"

$ mysum data1.txt
##or 
$ cat data1.txt | mysum