awk: find minimum and maximum in column

Question

I\'m using awk to deal with a simple .dat file, which contains several lines of data and each line has 4 columns separated by a single space. I want to fin

Answer 1

a non-awk answer:

cut -d" " -f1 file |
sort -n |
tee >(echo "min=$(head -1)") \
  > >(echo "max=$(tail -1)")

That tee command is perhaps a bit much too clever. tee duplicates its stdin stream to the files names as arguments, plus it streams the same data to stdout. I'm using process substitutions to filter the streams.

The same effect can be used (with less flourish) to extract the first and last lines of a stream of data:

cut -d" " -f1 file | sort -n | sed -n '1s/^/min=/p; $s/^/max=/p'

or

cut -d" " -f1 file | sort -n | { 
    read line
    echo "min=$line"
    while read line; do max=$line; done
    echo "max=$max"
}