Even with an original Bourne shell and back in the days before test was a shell built-in, the -ne comparison operator was for comparing numeric values; not strings. For strings, the not equal comparison operator is and was !=. And, I assume the final_total above in red was intended to be grand_total.

With POSIX conforming shells (and small input files), sort and shell might be faster than awk. You might want to try the following:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
sub_total=0
grand_total=0
prev_desc=
sort file | while IFS="=" read desc amount
do	if [ "$desc" != "$prev_desc" ]
	then	printf '%s=%d\n' "$prev_desc" "$sub_total"
		grand_total=$((grand_total + sub_total))
		sub_total=0
		prev_desc=$desc
	fi
	sub_total=$((sub_total + amount))
done
printf '%s=%d\n' "$prev_desc" "$sub_total"
grand_total=$((grand_total + sub_total))
printf 'Grand Total=%d\n' "$grand_total"

Although written and tested using a Korn shell, the above script should work with any POSIX-conforming shell. And, with a 1993 or later version of the Korn shell, if you change all three occurrences of %d in the above script to %.2f, this script can also handle amounts presented with or without a decimal point and up to 2 digits after the decimal point (instead of just processing whole numbers).