How to make of use of GNUPLOT in Linux for plotting graphs by taking inputs from files?

[Bill Oliver]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2014, Kalpa Welivitigoda wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Frank Murphy <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
>       On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:23:32 +0000
>       Norah Jones <nh.jones01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>       > lotting graphs by taking input from files?
> 
> Maybe use Google?
> http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~vrable/gnuplot/using-gnuplot.html
> 
> 
> http://lowrank.net/gnuplot/index-e.html is also a good source I use to refer to get help with gnuplot. Hope that will help.
>  
>[snip]

Actually, I'm not sure that will help her do what she wants to do.
Traditionally, gnuplot data files contain multiple columns, e.g.:

# x y
   1 2
   5 10
   6 12

rather than two single-column files, and I think the latter is what she
wants.  I don't think that gnuplot supports that (though I could be
wrong).  Thus, I think she needs to merge her two files, e.g.

plot "< join file1.dat file2.dat"

if I remember right....


As an aside, if you are going to be doing any data manipulation or
regression or such, I'd consider moving to R.   I have a lot of respect
for gnuplot, and I used it a lot as a grad student, but just about
everything I want to do I can do in R and make it look better.  The
learning curve is a bit nontrivial, but I've found it worth it.


billo