Add up a column of numbers at the Unix shell

Question

Given a list of files in files.txt, I can get a list of their sizes like this:

cat files.txt | xargs ls -l | cut -c 23-30

which pr

Answer 1

I would use "du" instead.

$ cat files.txt | xargs du -c | tail -1
4480    total

If you just want the number:

cat files.txt | xargs du -c | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'