An intro to "gnuplot" -- command line plotting tool for GNU/Linux

After a long time, I've started commit-ting to GitHub again (will keep on using GitLab too). While roaming around, found an old Gist of mine, discussing about gnuplot -- the command line plotting tool for GNU/Linux systems. The Gist is just a basic intro.

Here it is again, in script form:

#!/usr/bin/env gnuplot

## We are plotting a time-series data, Time in `HH:MM` is separated by a space with their respective Number, you can think of the number as the Number of Users of an Application. Here is a snippet of the input file `input.txt` (remove the hashes, of course); by default the output is shown on STDOUT, we're saving the output plot as `/tmp/out_image.jpg` (see below):

#12:00 2345
#12:15 5084
#12:30 2490
#12:45 3490
#13:00 4567
#13:15 4240
#13:30 3210


# `set title` sets the title of the graph/image, `font` sets the font name and size. We are setting the `font` as "calibri" and font size as 25. We can also set only the font size keeping the font as default which is "arial" e.g. `set title font ", 20"`.
set title "Time vs Number of Users" font "calibri, 25"

# Label on X-axis and font
set xlabel "Time in HH:MM" font "calibri, 20"

# Label on Y-axis and font
set ylabel "Number of Users" font "calibri, 20"

# `set` is used to set options of GNUplot. `set term` indicates what type of output to generate. Here we are generating JPEG image having size of 1200x800 pixels. The default is 640x480.
set term jpeg size 1200,800

# By default the resultant image is shown on STDOUT, `set output` redirects the output to the given file, the filename must be enclosed in double quotes
set output "/tmp/out_image.jpg"

# `set xdata` indicates the datatype used on the X-axis, `set xdata time` indicates the datatype is date/time.
set xdata time


# Indicates the format of the X-axis data given in the input, In our case we have used `Hour:Minute` format. For example, if our input is in the form `2015-12-04 14:45:34` then we would use `set timefmt '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`
set timefmt "%H:%M"


# Things to note for the `tics` options:
# - A `tic` is a point of notation on the graph. Major tics are labelled tics i.e. `|` with labels e.g. on X-axis the time `01:30`, major tic-marks always refer to an input value. `set xtics` is used to manipulate major tic options on X-axis, similarly `ytics` is used for Y-axis.

# - There is another kind of tic-mark known as minor tics. These occur in between the major tics and are not associated with an input. These can be manipulated by `set mxtics` and `set mytics` for X-axis and Y-axis respectively.


# The label format of the major tics on X-axis, the specifiers are similar to `set timefmt`
set xtics format "%H:%M"

# Sets font name and size for major tics on X-axis.
set xtics font ", 15"

# Will rotate the major tics on X by 90 degrees counter clock-wise
#set xtics rotate by 90

# Range of intervals i.e. difference between two successive major tics on X-axis, it has another version which will set the start time and end time too having the format `set xtics "start", "interval", "end"` e.g. `set xtics "12:00", "00:30", "18:30"`. The end value can be omitted.
set xtics "00:15"

# `set grid` will set grid on major tics (both X & Y), we can use `set grid xtics` to draw grids on `X` axis's majot tics only. Similar goes for `ytics` and minor tics `mxtics`, `mytics`.
set grid xtics

# This will unset minor tic-marks on the X-axis that occurs in between the major tics. To turn it on we can use `set mxtics`, this will sub-intervals with a frequency of 2-5 (Depending on input). We can set the number of sub-intervals for minor tics by `set mxtics <freq>` e.g. `set mxtics 2`, this will generate 2 sub-intervals i.e. 1 minor tic between 2 major tics.
unset mxtics


# Let's modify Y-axis parameters, on Y-axis we are plotting number of users i.e. positive integers so we don't have much to modify.
set ytics 500
set mytics 2
set ytics font ", 15"
set grid ytics mytics

# `set key` shows the options given to the `plot` command on the image, to turn it off we need `set key off`.
set key off


# Let's plot our data
plot "input.txt" using 1:2 with lines linewidth 10

# `plot` command is used to draw plots, `input.txt` is our input file having all the input data to be plotted.
# `using` option of `plot` tells which columns are to be plotted, `using 1:2` means plot column-1 and column-2 of input data where column-1 is matched against column-2.
# `with` defines the style we want to plot data as e.g. `with lines` will plot data with `lines` style.
# Some other styles are `impulses`, `dots`, `steps`, `points`, `labels`.
# We can also set other parameters like `linewidth`, `linecolor`, `linetype` of a style using appropriate options of `with`.
# For example to set a `linewidth` of 10 with the `lines` style we have used `with lines linewidth 10`.

Here is the input file, input.txt:

12:00 2345
12:15 5084
12:30 2490
12:45 3490
13:00 4567
13:15 4240
13:30 3210

To execute the script, make it executable and execute (assuming the script is script.gnp):

chmod u+x script.gnp
./script.gnp

Or, you can simply run the script as an argument to gnuplot:

gnuplot script.gnp

And the output (image) file, /tmp/out_image.jpg in this case:

Note: If not installed already, you can install gnuplot package by:

sudo apt install gnuplot  # Debian and derivatives
sudo yum install gnuplot  # Fedora and alike

All distros should have gnuplot package in their base repositories, so adding custom repositories should not be necessary.

Implementation detail: gnuplot is just the metapackage, installing it will automatically install the necessary Gtk/Qt and other necessary packages (as dependencies).

Happy gnuplot-ting!