Hacker friends suggested I post the result and code here because I'm writing open source statistics software and this is a practical example of results and code.
The results for a one bedroom in SF: mean $3348, median $3475, interquartile range $1514, and standard deviation $1130.
How to use Unix commands to find out: use `curl` to fetch Craigslist apartment listings, then `sed`, `grep`, and `tr` to filter and parse the data, then `num` to calculate the statistics.
curl -s http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/apa\?min_price\=1\&bedrooms\=1 |
sed 's/\(<p class="row"\)/\n\1/g' |
grep ' 1br ' |
tr ">" "\n" |
sed -n 's/^\$\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p' |
num mean median interquartile-range standard-deviation OFMT="%.0d"
The software I'm personally writing is the `num` command to calculate the statistics. The software is free at http://www.numcommand.com