[vox] vim magic

[Rob Rogers]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 21:42:10PM -0800, Jonathan McPherson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Generating a column of numbers with a single command.
> 
> I know of no way to do this with the default Vim install.  However,
> because it's such an handy trick, there are a number of scripts that
> people have written to do the job.  Here's a link to one of the best:
> 
> http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=156

Along those lines, I was looking for a way to find a sum of a column in
vi(m) the other day. I did search the scripts on vim.org, but couldn't
seem to find anything that fit (probably just wasn't using the right
search terms).

In this particluar instance, I was testing HD performance between 2
different kernels. I was booting each kernel and running the following:
hdparm -T /dev/hda | grep Timing | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d\= -f1
in a loop with the output going to a file, resulting in a file that
looked something like:
   724 MB in  2.01 seconds
   744 MB in  2.00 seconds
etc. A total for the columns would have let me calculate a quick
average.

And yes, I realize it's probably better to do it in perl, but this was a
one time hack, and it probably wasn't worth the time it would have
taken to write it.