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

late but a shorter command and with more precision without initial assumption:

  awk '(NR==1){Min=$1;Max=$1};(NR>=2){if(Min>$1) Min=$1;if(Max<$1) Max=$1} END {printf "The Min is %d ,Max is %d",Min,Max}' FileName.dat