NAME
    mean

SYNOPSYS
    <program> | mean

    The idea is you send a stream of numbers, integers or reals, separated
    by whitespace (no commas!) and this program will output statistics on
    the numbers.

    For example,

    $ echo 1 2 3 | mean

    gives

    # samples = 3
    mean = 2
    stddev = 0.816497
    std_dev_of_mean = 0.471405
    min = 1
    max = 3

    where std_dev_of_mean means standard deviation of mean, or
    stddev/sqrt(count).  If the sample is repeated multiple times and
    the means are taken as a new sample, this is what we expect the
    standard deviation of the new sample to be.  Quite useful.

    Output is put on separate lines (and stddev is spelled differently
    than it is in std_dev_of_mean) to facilitate grepping.  For example,
    to get just the mean of a bunch of numbers in the file numbers.txt,
    say

    mean <numbers.txt | egrep '^mean' | sed -e '/^.* /s///'

DIAGNOSTICS

    This program returns 0 on success, 1 if EOF was reached without
    encountering any data.

AUTHOR

    Will Naylor
    man page: Bill Chapman