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MINISTAT(1) General Commands Manual MINISTAT(1) NAME ministat -- statistics utility SYNOPSIS ministat [-Anqs] [-C column] [-c confidence] [-d delimiters] [-w width] [file ...] DESCRIPTION The ministat command calculates fundamental statistical properties of numeric data in the specified files or, if no file is specified, stan- dard input. The options are as follows: -A Just report the statistics of the input and relative comparisons, suppress the ASCII-art plot. -C column Specify which column of data to use. By default the first column in the input file(s) is used. -c confidence Specify desired confidence level for Student's T analy- sis. Possible percent values are 80, 90, 95, 98, 99, and 99.5. -d delimiters Specify the column delimiter characters, default is ` \t' (i.e., a space and a tab). See strtok(3) for de- tails. -n Just report the raw statistics of the input, suppress the ASCII-art plot and the relative comparisons. -q Suppress printing of summary statistics and data-set names; typically for use alongside -n. -s Print the average/median/stddev bars on separate lines in the ASCII-art plot, to avoid overlap. -w width Set the width of the ASCII-art plot in characters. The default is the terminal width, or 74 if standard output is not a terminal. ministat accepts up to seven input files. Each dataset must contain at least three values. EXIT STATUS The ministat utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. EXAMPLES Let's consider two input files. The first one will be "iguana": 50 200 150 400 750 400 150 The second one will be "chameleon": 150 400 720 500 930 A sample output could look like this: $ ministat -s -w 60 iguana chameleon x iguana + chameleon +------------------------------------------------------------+ |x * x * + + x +| | |________M______A_______________| | | |________________M__A___________________| | +------------------------------------------------------------+ N Min Max Median Avg Stddev x 7 50 750 200 300 238.04761 + 5 150 930 500 540 299.08193 No difference proven at 95.0% confidence If ministat tells you, as in the example above, that there is no dif- ference proven at 95% confidence, the two datasets you gave it are for all statistical purposes identical. You have the option of lowering your standards by specifying a lower confidence level: $ ministat -s -w 60 -c 80 iguana chameleon x iguana + chameleon +------------------------------------------------------------+ |x * x * + + x +| | |________M______A_______________| | | |________________M__A___________________| | +------------------------------------------------------------+ N Min Max Median Avg Stddev x 7 50 750 200 300 238.04761 + 5 150 930 500 540 299.08193 Difference at 80.0% confidence 240 +/- 212.215 80% +/- 70.7384% (Student's t, pooled s = 264.159) But a lower standard does not make your data any better, and the exam- ple is only included here to show the format of the output when a sta- tistical difference is proven according to Student's T method. SEE ALSO Any mathematics text on basic statistics, for instance the following book, which supplied the above example: Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith, The Cartoon Guide to Statistics, HarperPerennial, 1993, ISBN 0-06-273102-5. HISTORY The ministat command was written by Poul-Henning Kamp out of frustra- tion over all the bogus benchmark claims made by people with no under- standing of the importance of uncertainty and statistics. From FreeBSD 5.2 it has lived in the source tree as a developer tool, graduating to the installed system from FreeBSD 8.0. FreeBSD ports 15.quarterly November 13, 2025 MINISTAT(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | HISTORY
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