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

There is also simple-r, which can do almost everything that R can, but with less keystrokes:

https://code.google.com/p/simple-r/

To calculate basic descriptive statistics, one would have to type one of:

r summary file.txt
r summary - < file.txt
cat file.txt | r summary -

For each of average, median, min, max and std deviation, the code would be:

seq 1 100 | r mean - 
seq 1 100 | r median -
seq 1 100 | r min -
seq 1 100 | r max -
seq 1 100 | r sd -

Doesn't get any simple-R!

Answer 2

data_hacks is a Python command-line utility for basic statistics.

The first example from that page produces the desired results:

$ cat /tmp/data | histogram.py
# NumSamples = 29; Max = 10.00; Min = 1.00
# Mean = 4.379310; Variance = 5.131986; SD = 2.265389
# each * represents a count of 1
    1.0000 -     1.9000 [     1]: *
    1.9000 -     2.8000 [     5]: *****
    2.8000 -     3.7000 [     8]: ********
    3.7000 -     4.6000 [     3]: ***
    4.6000 -     5.5000 [     4]: ****
    5.5000 -     6.4000 [     2]: **
    6.4000 -     7.3000 [     3]: ***
    7.3000 -     8.2000 [     1]: *
    8.2000 -     9.1000 [     1]: *
    9.1000 -    10.0000 [     1]: *

Answer 3

Also, the self-write stats, (bundled with 'scut') a perl util to do just that. Fed a stream of numbers on STDIN, it tries to reject non-numbers and emits the following:

$ ls -lR | scut -f=4 | stats
Sum       3.10271e+07
Number    452
Mean      68643.9
Median    4469.5
Mode      4096
NModes    6
Min       2
Max       1.01171e+07
Range     1.01171e+07
Variance  3.03828e+11
Std_Dev   551206
SEM       25926.6
95% Conf  17827.9 to 119460
          (for a normal distribution - see skew)
Skew      15.4631
          (skew = 0 for a symmetric dist)
Std_Skew  134.212
Kurtosis  258.477
          (K=3 for a normal dist)

It can also do a number of transforms on the input stream and emit only the unadorned value if you ask it; ie 'stats --mean' will return the mean as an unlabelled float.

Answer 4

Yet another tool: https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/

# Example: calculate the sum and mean of values 1 to 10:
$ seq 10 | datamash sum 1 mean 1
55 5.5

Might be more commonly packaged (the first tool I found prepackaged for nix at least)