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

I found myself wanting to do this in a shell pipeline, and getting all the right arguments for R took a while. Here's what I came up with:

seq 10 | R --slave -e 'x <- scan(file="stdin",quiet=TRUE); summary(x)' Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. 1.00 3.25 5.50 5.50 7.75 10.00

The --slave option "Make(s) R run as quietly as possible...It implies --quiet and --no-save." The -e option tells R to treat the following string as R code. The first statement reads from standard in, and stores what's read in the variable called "x". The quiet=TRUE option to the scan function suppresses the writing of a line saying how many items were read. The second statement applies the summary function to x, which produces the output.