Question

I am trying to find the total size of the libc.a module using the unix size command.

When running it, I get a lot of different files total sizes. What is one possible way in which I can take one column of the output of ‘size’ (the column dec in this case which has the total size of the file in decimal) and add them up?

Is that possible to do in the command line?

Answer 1

One way to do this:

size libc.a | awk '{ print " " $4 " " }' | tail -n +2 | paste -sd'+' | xargs expr

The steps:

1. Use size to generate the ouput
2. Use awk to print the fourth field inserted between spaces
3. Use tail to print from the second line (ie. skip the first line)
4. Use paste to join all the lines, separated by a +
5. use xargs to pass the result as a parameter to expr.
   1. Use expr to add up the values