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Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

Great idea. If anyone here wants a microgrant and has POSIX distro skills, I can offer $100 to you or your favorite charity for help getting the `num` command added to the POSIX standard track so it becomes freely available for everyone.

Num is free open source software that uses `awk` to calculate many typical statistics on the command line.

https://github.com/numcommand/num

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That's a nice little utility. A poor man's version would be to use Perl, which is mostly everywhere and comes bundled with List::Util. Missing a fair amount of what you're providing, but would work in a pinch, especially with some aliases to scrub the boilerplate out.

  echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say min @F' # min
  echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say max @F' # max
  echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say sum @F' # sum
  echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say sum(@F)/@F' # average
  echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say reduce {"$a,$b"} @F' # arbitrary ops

Good thank you, these are very helpful!

Correct URL: https://github.com/numcommand/num

I will donate $1k for GNU/Linux systems to handle cdate. /joke

What would that imply actually?

Ideally someone saying e.g. "I'm experienced with asking the POSIX standards folks to consider adding the `num` command to POSIX, and I'll do a few hours of volunteering to help toward this goal".

Or "I know how to package the `num` command for Linux (e.g. Ubuntu apt, Fedora yum) and BSD (e.g. FreeBSD pkg, macOS brew), and I'll do a few hours of volunteering to set up packaging, in order for users to be able to install more easily".

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