How can I quickly sum all numbers in a file?

Question

I have a file which contains several thousand numbers, each on it's own line:

34
42
11
6
2
99
...

I'm looking to write a script which will print the sum of all numbers in the file. I've got a solution, but it's not very efficient. (It takes several minutes to run.) I'm looking for a more efficient solution. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is straight Bash:

sum=0
while read -r line
do
    (( sum += line ))
done < file
echo $sum

Answer 2

Perl 6

say sum lines

~$ perl6 -e '.say for 0..1000000' > test.in

~$ perl6 -e 'say sum lines' < test.in
500000500000

Answer 3

I don't know if you can get a lot better than this, considering you need to read through the whole file.

$sum = 0;
while(<>){
   $sum += $_;
}
print $sum;

Answer 4

With Ruby:

ruby -e "File.read('file.txt').split.inject(0){|mem, obj| mem += obj.to_f}"

Answer 5

Here is a solution using python with a generator expression. Tested with a million numbers on my old cruddy laptop.

time python -c "import sys; print sum((float(l) for l in sys.stdin))" < file

real    0m0.619s
user    0m0.512s
sys     0m0.028s

Answer 6

Just for fun, let's benchmark it:

$ for ((i=0; i<1000000; i++)) ; do echo $RANDOM; done > random_numbers

$ time perl -nle '$sum += $_ } END { print $sum' random_numbers
16379866392

real    0m0.226s
user    0m0.219s
sys     0m0.002s

$ time awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' random_numbers
16379866392

real    0m0.311s
user    0m0.304s
sys     0m0.005s

$ time { { tr "\n" + < random_numbers ; echo 0; } | bc; }
16379866392

real    0m0.445s
user    0m0.438s
sys     0m0.024s

$ time { s=0;while read l; do s=$((s+$l));done<random_numbers;echo $s; }
16379866392

real    0m9.309s
user    0m8.404s
sys     0m0.887s

$ time { s=0;while read l; do ((s+=l));done<random_numbers;echo $s; }
16379866392

real    0m7.191s
user    0m6.402s
sys     0m0.776s

$ time { sed ':a;N;s/\n/+/;ta' random_numbers|bc; }
^C

real    4m53.413s
user    4m52.584s
sys 0m0.052s

I aborted the sed run after 5 minutes

---

I've been diving to lua, and it is speedy:

$ time lua -e 'sum=0; for line in io.lines() do sum=sum+line end; print(sum)' < random_numbers
16388542582.0

real    0m0.362s
user    0m0.313s
sys     0m0.063s

and while I'm updating this, ruby:

$ time ruby -e 'sum = 0; File.foreach(ARGV.shift) {|line| sum+=line.to_i}; puts sum' random_numbers
16388542582

real    0m0.378s
user    0m0.297s
sys     0m0.078s

---

Heed Ed Morton's advice: using $1

$ time awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' random_numbers
16388542582

real    0m0.421s
user    0m0.359s
sys     0m0.063s

vs using $0

$ time awk '{ sum += $0 } END { print sum }' random_numbers
16388542582

real    0m0.302s
user    0m0.234s
sys     0m0.063s