How to get 'bounding cube'?

[davidmcnabnz]

Hi there,
Is there a straightforward way to determine position and size of the smallest possible rectangular prism which fully (but just barely) contains all of a shape's solid parts?

Ideally, this would be a method which returns two triads, ((x,y,z), (w,d,h)), where (x,y,z) is the absolute location of left lower bottom point of the containing prism, and (w,d,h) indicating width (x), depth (y) and height (h) of the prism.

One immediate use case is having an easy way to arrange as many copies of a shape as are possible (n x m) on a 3d printing bed, for printing as many copies of the shape as possible within a single print run.

Any thoughts?