The following is an example of the script called "total".

Here we use total to sum field 5 (file size) from an "ls -l" output,

   $ ls -l | total 5
   21488

if you prefer, you can do this using an awk one-liner,

   $ ls -l | awk '{ s += $5 } END { print s }'
   21488

or wrestle with either "dc" or "bc". Although since I do this numerous times
a day, the "total" script will save me a bunch of keystrokes.

...

The data we were just summing was,

   $ ls -l
   total 48
   drwxr-xr-x   2 brendan  other       1024 May 14  2005 Bak/
   -rwxr-xr-x   1 brendan  other       2739 Aug 15 18:21 addwms*
   -rwxr-xr-x   1 brendan  other       1772 Aug 15 21:33 field*
   -rw-r--r--   1 brendan  other       2781 May  7  2005 getping.cgi
   -rw-r--r--   1 brendan  other       2758 May  7  2005 getping.sh
   -rw-r--r--   1 brendan  other        329 May  7  2005 pinghosts
   -rwxr-xr-x   1 brendan  other       1871 Aug 15 21:33 total*
   -rw-r--r--   1 brendan  other       8214 May  7  2005 watchping