Although I've already shown you how to sum numbers up in bash, I only covered the bash way of doing it. I really like scripting with bash, but when it comes to calculations, there's quite a few important features missing from bash, and fixed point (thanks for the correction, Azrael Tod!) calculations is one of them. Fortunately, bc command comes as a standard in most Unix distros, and can be used for quite complex calculations.
Basic calculations with bc
bc is a very simple command. It takes standard input as an expression and then evaluates this, performing all the necessary calculations and showing you the result. Thus, to quickly sum numbers up or get a result of some other calculation, simply echo the expression and then pipe it out to the bc command:
ubuntu$ echo "1+2" | bc 3