MINISTAT(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

ministat — it's the statistics utility, bestie! This is the ministat(1) page from the General Commands Manual, and we're gonna get through it together 💖

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ministat [-Anqs] [-C column] [-c confidence] [-d delimiters] [-w width]
         [file ...]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

Okay so ministat crunches the fundamental statistical properties of numeric data — the data lives in whatever files you name, or if you name literally no files, it reads from standard input. Simple as that 🫶

The options are as follows:

• -A — just report the statistics of the input plus the relative comparisons, and suppress that ASCII-art plot. Plot's cute but she's not invited today 💀
• -C column — pick which column of data to use. Default behavior is that first column in the input file(s) gets used. No notes ✨
• -c confidence — set the confidence level you want for the Student's T analysis. Possible percent values are 80, 90, 95, 98, 99, and 99.5. Choose wisely, queen 👑
• -d delimiters — set the column delimiter characters. Default is ‘ \t’ (i.e., a space and a tab). See strtok(3) for the details, iykyk 🦋
• -n — just report the raw statistics of the input, suppress the ASCII-art plot and the relative comparisons. Bare minimum era 🙈
• -q — suppress printing of summary statistics and data-set names; typically for use alongside -n. Quiet luxury 💅
• -s — print the average/median/stddev bars on separate lines in the ASCII-art plot, so they don't overlap. Personal space is self-care 🌸
• -w width — set the width of the ASCII-art plot in characters. Default is the terminal width, or 74 if standard output is not a terminal. Customize her ⭐

Ngl, ministat accepts up to seven input files. That's the cap, bestie.

Also, each dataset must contain at least three values. Three is the minimum, no exceptions, that's the vibe check 🔥

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🦋 EXIT STATUS 🦋

The ministat utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. That's it, that's the whole rule 🎀

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💖 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

So 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 statistical purposes, identical. Literally twins 👯‍♀️

You do 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. Don't come for me, I'm just the messenger 💀

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🧚 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, HarperPerennial, 1993, ISBN 0-06-273102-5.

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🌈 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. Honestly? Iconic motivation. He ate 👑

From FreeBSD 5.2 it has lived in the source tree as a developer tool, graduating to the installed system from FreeBSD 8.0. Glow-up of the century, fr fr ✨

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And that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 — this came from the Debian build dated November 13, 2025, so yeah, MINISTAT(1), Debian edition, and she's still serving statistics realness to this day 💜