This AWK script is useful when you want to calculate the average and sum for a set of values found in a log file.

   1  awk '{ s += $1 } END { print "sum: ", s, " average: ", s/NR, " samples: ", NR }' rails_production_log_or_whatever.log

Note that $1 means that column one contains the values you want to use. NR is the total number of rows in the file. As an example, let’s say you have this log file:

   1  1
   2  2
   3  3
   4  4
   5  5

The output would then be:

   1  sum:  15  average:  3  samples:  5

Combine it with grep or sed to do more advanced log file analysis —you can for example calculate the average time it took to render action xyz in Rails on the 21th of July at 21:00 PM.

Note that by default the column values should be space separated—use the following switch to parse CSV (comma separated) files: -F,