The MIN function returns the minimum value of a matrix or set of matrices. The matrices can be numeric or character.

The MIN function produces a single numeric value (or a character string value) that is the smallest element (lowest character string value) in all arguments. There can be as many as 15 argument matrices. The function checks for missing numeric values and excludes them from the result. If all arguments are missing, then the machine’s largest representable number is the result.

If you want to find the elementwise minimums of the corresponding elements of two matrices, use the element minimum operator (><).

For character arguments, the size of the result is the size of the largest of all arguments.

The following statements use the MIN function to compute the minimum value of a vector:

c = {1 -123 13 56 128 -81 12};
b = min(c);
print b;