One-liner to sum up numbers from a CSV file

This is the shopping.csv CSV file that we will be working with throughout this blog post.

item,price
rice,2.49
potatos,1.49
pasta,3.79

The goal is to create a one-line bash script that prints the sum of the prices in the file above, which is 7.77.

1. Print the file content

$ cat shopping.csv

This command prints the file content without modifications. It gives us a way to redirect - pipe - the output to another command in the next step.

Output:

item,price
rice,2.49
potatos,1.49
pasta,3.79

2. Cut the first line

There are many ways to achieve it, but we use the tail +n syntax.

In our case, it takes all the lines until the end of the file, starting from the second line.

$ cat shopping.csv | tail +2

Output:

rice,2.49
potatos,1.49
pasta,3.79

3. Cut the first column

awk splits each line by a separator defined by the option -F. In our case, it's the comma. Then it prints the second column from every row.

$ cat shopping.csv | tail +2 | awk -F , '{print $2}'

Output:

2.49
1.49
3.79

4. Concatenate the prices

xargs is used to "squash" the lines into a single string, separating them by space.

$ cat shopping.csv | tail +2 | awk -F , '{print $2}' | xargs

Output:

2.49 1.49 3.79

5. Replace spaces with pluses

The sed expression replaces the escaped space with + in the entire string (globally - g).

$ cat shopping.csv | tail +2 | awk -F , '{print $2}' | xargs | sed -e 's/\ /+/g'

Output:

2.49+1.49+3.79

6. Perform the calculation

bc is a simple calculator that you can use interactively or by piping an equation into it.

$ cat shopping.csv | tail +2 | awk -F , '{print $2}' | xargs | sed -e 's/\ /+/g' | bc

Output:

7.77