Summing up records in large CSV with ack

A while ago I was using Powershell to help me with a mundane work on Windows. Today I’m on OS X and the task is simple. Sum up the third column in a CSV. But the problem is that the CSV is too large to be open and processed in Excel or Numbers.

We can deal with it by using awk – a language designed for text processing in shell.

awk -F ',' '{ x = x + $3 } END { print x }' test.csv

And with this simple one liner the calculation is done in a blink of an eye. UNIX tools proved to be powerful again.

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