Let’s assume we have a file with five columns where first column is text and rest of the columns are numeric. How can we calculate the standard deviation (or other statistical functions) with a perl one-liner?
We’ll use Statistics::Descriptive module.
perl -MStatistics::Descriptive -ane 'BEGIN{our $stat = Statistics::Descriptive::Full->new}; $stat->add_data(@F[1..4]); print $stat->standard_deviation,"\n"; $stat->clear' filename
$stat->clear at the end was needed since data is added not assigned to $stat each time, so in order to prevent cumulative calculation, $stat variable should be cleared each time.
