command line utility to print statistics of numbers in linux

Question

I often find myself with a file that has one number per line. I end up importing it in excel to view things like median, standard deviation and so forth.

Is there a

Answer 1

Yet another tool which could be used for calculating statistics and view distribution in ASCII mode is ministat. It's a tool from FreeBSD, but it also packaged for popular Linux distribution like Debian/Ubuntu. Or you can simply download and build it from sources - it only requires a C compiler and the C standard library.

Usage example:

$ cat test.log 
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.575278
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.569267
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.540344
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.547680
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.692373
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.390200
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.391308
Handled 1000000 packets.Time elapsed: 7.388075

$ cat test.log| awk '{print $5}' | ministat -w 74
x 
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| x                                                                        |
|xx                                   xx    x x                           x|
|   |__________________________A_______M_________________|                 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x   8      7.388075      7.692373       7.54768     7.5118156    0.11126122