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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 nu- meric data in the specified files or, if no file is specified, standard in- put. The options are as follows: -A Just report the statistics of the input and relative compar- isons, 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 analysis. 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 details. -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 de- fault 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 difference proven at 95% confidence, the two datasets you gave it are for all statis- tical purposes identical. You have the option of lowering your standards by specifying a lower confi- dence 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 example is only included here to show the format of the output when a statistical dif- ference 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, Harper- Perennial, 1993, ISBN 0-06-273102-5. HISTORY The ministat command was written by Poul-Henning Kamp out of frustration over all the bogus benchmark claims made by people with no understanding of the importance of uncertainty and statistics. From FreeBSD 5.2 it has lived in the source tree as a developer tool, grad- uating 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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