Question

I’m trying to use awk to add up the numbers from an output file, but it seems awk doesn’t understand the commas separating the thousands.

For example, running

awk '{if($1=="foo") {SUM+=$2}}END{print "foos ",SUM}'

on

foo 70.31
foo 125.00
foo 1,750.00

returns

foos 196.31

What’s the best/appropriate way in awk to add these up correctly?

Answer 1

awk '{if($1=="foo") {gsub(",", "", $2); SUM+=$2}}END{print "foos ",SUM}'

Or, if you don’t want to clobber $2:

awk '{if($1=="foo") {TERM=$2; gsub(",", "", TERM); SUM+=TERM}}END{print "foos ",SUM}'