Problem
You want to count the contents of a column. Accumulatively totaling each number in a given column.
Solution
To total up the contents of a given column, use following awk code:
Example
nawk -v col=# ' { tot+=$col } END { print tot } '
In this example, do a du of the current directory and then total column one (1). Notice awk receives a variable on the column to sum up.
du -ks * | awk -v col=1 ' { tot+=$col } END { print tot } '
11168
Reference
[tags]UNIX, awk, nawk, gawk, Unix Coding School[/tags]
