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.

DerfK · Answer 1 · 2011-02-23 23:30:49Z

up vote 6 down vote accepted

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
7,7182412

	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

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ddrown · Answer 2 · 2012-01-27 19:40:48Z

up vote 1 down vote

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 at 19:40

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2 Answers