Median of a column in a .tab file from command line

To find the median of a certain column from the command line, first put the path of the file into a
shell variable:

PATH='/path/to/the/table.tab'

specify the column you want to use:


COLUMN=6


and then call the R interpreter from the command line to calculate the median of the wanted column:

MEDIAN=`echo "r=read.table('$PATH');cat(median(r[,$COLUMN]))" | R --slave`