Question

I have a file which contains several thousand numbers, each on its 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

For a Perl one-liner, it’s basically the same thing as the awk solution in Ayman Hourieh’s answer:

 % perl -nle '$sum += $_ } END { print $sum'

If you’re curious what Perl one-liners do, you can deparse them:

 %  perl -MO=Deparse -nle '$sum += $_ } END { print $sum'

The result is a more verbose version of the program, in a form that no one would ever write on their own:

BEGIN { $/ = "\n"; $\ = "\n"; }
LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
    chomp $_;
    $sum += $_;
}
sub END {
    print $sum;
}
-e syntax OK

Just for giggles, I tried this with a file containing 1,000,000 numbers (in the range 0 – 9,999). On my Mac Pro, it returns virtually instantaneously. That’s too bad, because I was hoping using mmap would be really fast, but it’s just the same time:

use 5.010;
use File::Map qw(map_file);

map_file my $map, $ARGV[0];

$sum += $1 while $map =~ m/(\d+)/g;

say $sum;