use perl BEGIN / END blocks for summations

Various Perl one-liners are very useful in data manipulation. the "-ne" mode in perl allows the command specified to be run over each line of stdin. However, if you want to do a summation and only print the final tally, you can make use of the BEGIN / END blocks in Perl. Initialize the counter in the BEGIN block, print the sum in the END block.

Say, there is a file of numbers called "nums" , each number seperated by a newline, and we want to sum the numbers:

cat nums | perl -ne 'BEGIN{$s=0;} chomp; $s+=$_; END {print "$s\n"}'