Provided by: ministat_20150715-1build1_amd64 
NAME
ministat — statistics utility
SYNOPSIS
ministat [-Ans] [-C column] [-c confidence_level] [-d delimiter] [-w [width]] [file ...]
DESCRIPTION
The ministat command calculates fundamental statistical properties of numeric data in the specified files
or, if no file is specified, standard input.
The options are as follows:
-A Just report the statistics of the input and relative comparisons, suppress the ASCII-art
plot.
-n Just report the raw statistics of the input, suppress the ASCII-art plot and the relative
comparisons.
-s Print the average/median/stddev bars on separate lines in the ASCII-art plot, to avoid
overlap.
-C column Specify which column of data to use. By default the first column in the input file(s) are
used.
-c confidence_level
Specify desired confidence level for Student's T analysis. Possible values are 80, 90, 95,
98, 99 and 99.5 %
-d delimiter
Specifies the column delimiter characters, default is SPACE and TAB. See strtok(3) for
details.
-w width Width of ASCII-art plot in characters. The default is the terminal width, or 74 if standard
output is not a terminal.
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 data sets 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 example is only included here to show
the format of the output when a statistical difference is proven according to Student's T method.
SEE ALSO
Any mathematics text on basic statistics, for instances Larry Gonicks excellent "Cartoon Guide to
Statistics" which supplied the above example.
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, graduating to the installed system
from FreeBSD 8.0.
Debian November 10, 2012 MINISTAT(1)