NAME median - Calculate the median values for a set of groups SYNOPSIS median DESCRIPTION median takes the first blank space-separated column values and the remainder as keys. It will then print the median for each key. Lines with the same key form a group. median outputs the median value for each key, no order of the output lines are prescribed. No order is prescribed for the input lines. Lines without a blank space are parsed as having the empty string as the key, for lines with a blank space, the first blank space is parsed as part of the key. For groups with an even number of elements, if the mean of the middle two values are used as the median if all values in the group are numerical, otherwise the lower value is used as the median. EXAMPLES $ cat <<EOF | median -10 2 4 3 50 EOF 3 $ cat <<EOF | median +003 c .001 a -002 b +001 c -001 b +002 c EOF .001 a -001.5 b +002 c RATIONALE Combining sort(1), sed(1), wc(1), expr(1) to do this is too much work to do on a regular basis. SEE ALSO sort(1), expr(1), sets(1)