til/vim/sum-a-bunch-of-numbers-in-the-current-file.md

Sum A Bunch Of Numbers In The Current File

Let's say I have a bunch of big numbers on consecutive lines in the file I currently have open in Vim. Like this:

   418564
   921550
  1180181
  1234458
  2706100
 15954945
 16254608

If I make a visual selection of those numbers and then hit :, it will open a command prompt for the beginning ('<) to the end ('>) of the visual selection. I can then shell out those lines to an external command by starting the command with !. The command to shell out to for this scenario is awk which can sum up values from a "file" in a single line.

The whole thing will look like this:

:'<,'>!awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'

Hit enter. Then awk will produce the sum and replace the highlighted lines with that value.

38670406

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