Suming a list of numbers of the shell

Manipulating lists on the shell can be done with awk. The most common one I encounter is summing numbers. Here is a quick bit of shell magic to sum up the size of all log files below a certian dictionary. Awk has much more power than this however.

find . -type f | grep "\.log" | xargs ls -al | sed "s/  */ /g" | cut -d " " -f 5 | awk -F: '{total+=$1} END{print total}'