How to sum a bash array of numbers (some in scientific notation)?

Question

Since the following command using bc does not work for numbers in scientific notation, I was wondering about an alternative, e.g. using awk?

sum=$( IFS="+"; bc <<< "${arrValues[*]}" )

Answer 1

sum=$(
  awk 'BEGIN {t=0; for (i in ARGV) t+=ARGV[i]; print t}' "${arrValues[@]}"
)

With zsh (in case you don't have to use bash), since it supports floating point numbers internally:

sum=$((${(j[+])arrValues}))

With ksh93:

If you need the kind of precision that bc provides, you could pre-process the numbers so that 12e23 is changed to (12*10^23):

sum=$(
  IFS=+
  sed 's/\([0-9.]*\)[eE]\([-+]*[0-9]*\)/(\1*10^\2)/g' <<< "${arrValues[*]}" |
    bc -l
)

Answer 2

Perl solution:

perl -MList::Util=sum -l -e 'print sum(@ARGV)' -- "${array[@]}"

Or for arbitrary precision:

perl -Mbignum -MList::Util=sum -l -e 'print sum(0, @ARGV)' -- "${array[@]}"

(with a literal 0 added to force the sum to be made with bignums).