Show HN: st – simple statistics from the command line

That does not read the data from stdin. You could probably get it to work with some bash wizardry. But maybe not. I did spend some time on this a few years ago and it may have changed in the interim, but my memory is that I tried load("/dev/stdin") and using a fifo etc and it doesn't work (probably because load() uses some seeks to determine matrix data shape before reading data in i.e. data is read in as columns instead of reading in rows and transposing). At least that was my takeaway. At least if you want to use the load() builtin.

Basically you just need to write an octave function that reads values from the terminal.

One suggestion: whatever the default may be, give an option to have line-delimited output rather than column-delimited.

IMHO if you want your script's output to be easily usable by other scripts, line-delimited is easier since you can grep out what lines you want rather than having to rely on the column position never changing (since you can give cut only a field number and not a field name like "average").

I wrote a program to quickly generate histograms from data. Seems like it would complement "st" nicely for quick command land stats calculations.

https://github.com/SamChill/hist

why not write a one line python program instead? I'd never use the shell for these kinds of things. Quickly they grow into more than something that a simple one liner can handle. Before you know it, you're reading from a CSV and summing column "foo" and so on. This then turns your shell approach into mess, instead of a (now 5 line) python program.