Bash command to sum a column of numbers [duplicate]

Question

I want a bash command that I can pipe into that will sum a column of numbers. I just want a quick one liner that will do something essentially like this:

cat FileWithColumnOfNumbers.txt | sum 

Answer 1

Using existing file:

paste -sd+ infile | bc 

Using stdin:

<cmd> | paste -sd+ | bc 

Edit: With some paste implementations you need to be more explicit when reading from stdin:

<cmd> | paste -sd+ - | bc

Options used:

-s (serial) - merges all the lines into a single line

-d - use a non-default delimiter (the character + in this case)

Answer 2

I like the chosen answer. However, it tends to be slower than awk since 2 tools are needed to do the job.

$ wc -l file 49999998 file  $ time paste -sd+ file | bc 1448700364  real    1m36.960s user    1m24.515s sys     0m1.772s  $ time awk '{s+=$1}END{print s}' file 1448700364  real    0m45.476s user    0m40.756s sys     0m0.287s