Using bash, how can i find out the average, max and min from a list of numbers?

Question

I have a series piped greps, awks and seds which produce a list of numbers, one on each line. Something like this:

1.13
3.59 
1.23

How can i pipe this to something which will output the average, max, and min?

If you're piping grep, awk and sed together, the same thing can often be done in one invocation of awk. — Dennis Williamson, Feb 23 '11 at 23:54

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 23 '11 at 23:30

29

Since you're already using awk

blahblahblah | awk '{if(min==""){min=max=$1}; if($1>max) {max=$1}; if($1<min) {min=$1}; total+=$1; count+=1} END {print total/count, max, min}'

answered Feb 23 '11 at 23:30

DerfK

19,493
2
38
54

Nice, it works for me! – JavaRocky Feb 23 '11 at 23:44
I thought there would of been already a binary which accepts a list of numbers and the count, avg, min, max for you, kind of like using 'time'. – JavaRocky Feb 23 '11 at 23:45
1

I would just put the above `awk` pattern in `/usr/local/bin/stats` or such, and then use it as `blabla | stats`. – Asclepius Aug 29 '13 at 20:11

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 27 '12 at 19:40

4

I find this program useful for generating stats on lists of numbers at the command line: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/misc/stats/stats.html

answered Jan 27 '12 at 19:40

ddrown

81
2

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 03 '20 at 13:56

You can use ministat:

$ ministat -n
1.13
3.59 
1.23

x <stdin>
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x   3          1.13          3.59          1.23     1.9833333     1.3923122

And with tail, sed and cut you can extract a single field, e.g. ministat -n | tail -1 | sed -r 's/ +/ /g;' | cut -d\ -f 6 gives you the average (since it: takes the last line; removes extra spaces; then takes the sixth non-space token on the line).

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 30 '13 at 20:48

There is also simple-r, which can do almost everything that R can, but with less keystrokes:

https://code.google.com/p/simple-r/

To calculate average, max, and min, one would have to type one of:

r summary file.txt
r summary - < file.txt
cat file.txt | r summary -

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 03 '15 at 00:55

With a tip of the hat to @DerfK:

perl -lane '$n=$F[0]; if(not defined $min){$min=$max=$n}; if($n>$max){$max=$n}; if($n<$min){$min=$n}; $total+=$n; $count+=1; END{print $total/$count." $max $min"}'

$F[0] is the value in the first (0'th) field of each line

If your input data is comma separated, add the -F, modifier before -lane

Using bash, how can i find out the average, max and min from a list of numbers?

5 Answers5