how to find minimum and maximum of a data set
#minimum cat your_data_file.dat | sort -nk3,3 | head -1 #this will find minumum of column 3 #maximun cat your_data_file.dat | sort -nk3,3 | tail -1 #this will find maximum of column 3 #to find in column 2 , use -nk2,2 #assing to a variable and use min_col=`cat your_data_file.dat | sort -nk3,3 | head -1 | awk '{print $3}'`