I'm trying to add a column of numbers which contain commas in a file called countries.txt; i.e, 123,456. The numbers are in the 2nd column of the file. The general structure of the command is:

awk '(tot+=$2); END {print "Total = " tot} countries.txt

When I execute this all I get is the sum of the numbers prior to the first comma. I know that I have to either parse the numbers or somehow get rid of the commas.

Can anyone tell me how to do this. Thanks.

Larry

You could rinse out the commas before it ever hits awk:

sed 's/,//g' | awk .....

Or maybe specify the input field separator in the BEGIN section of the awk script itself, which I think is

BEGIN { IFS=" " }

(or whatever non-comma field separates your columns)

-mark