What's wrong with this Bourne shell script?

[Tom Christiansen]

In article <FPB.90Aug16005419 at ittc.ittc.wec.com> fbresz at ittc.wec.com writes:
[chiding of Randal deleted]
>	That would be fine if I had or wanted pearl.  I was under the
>impression that Jon's addcol was an awk script (I think that's where the
>original thread came from anway) in which the -# was the column you wanted
>to add and it would magically add up the numbers in column 1 or 7 or
>whatever column you wanted under argumentalized control instead of having
>separate scripts for each possible set of columns you want to add.

You mean perl, but anyway....

    usage: addcol field_number

as in 'ls -l | addcol 5'

    #!/bin/sh
    field=$1
    shift
    awk "{sum += \$$field;}END {print sum}" $*

If you want to bullet-prove it against bad args, you can 
do more checking

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen                       {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist 
Convex Computer Corporation                            tchrist at convex.COM
  "UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things,
   because that policy would also keep them from doing clever things." [gwyn]