Command-line Unix ASCII-based charting / plotting tool

Question

Is there a good command-line UNIX charting / graphing / plotting tool out there? I'm looking for something that will plot xy points on an ASCII graph.

Just to clarify, I'm looking for something that will output a graph in ASCII (like ascii-art style), so I can use it over an interactive shell session without needing X.

Answer 1

Try gnuplot. It has very powerful graphing possibilities.

It can output to your terminal in the following way:

gnuplot> set terminal dumb
Terminal type set to 'dumb'
Options are 'feed 79 24'
gnuplot> plot sin(x)

   1 ++----------------**---------------+----**-----------+--------**-----++
     +                *+ *              +   *  *          +  sin(x) ****** +
 0.8 ++              *    *                *    *                *    *   ++
     |               *    *                *    *                *    *    |
 0.6 ++              *     *              *      *              *      *  ++
     *              *       *             *       *             *      *   |
 0.4 +*             *       *             *       *             *      *  ++
     |*            *        *            *        *            *        *  |
 0.2 +*            *        *            *        *            *        * ++
     | *          *          *          *          *          *          * |
   0 ++*          *          *          *          *          *          *++
     |  *         *           *         *           *         *           *|
-0.2 ++ *         *           *         *           *         *           *+
     |   *       *            *        *            *        *            *|
-0.4 ++  *       *            *        *            *        *            *+
     |   *      *              *      *              *      *              *
-0.6 ++  *      *              *      *              *      *             ++
     |    *     *               *     *               *    *               |
-0.8 ++    *   *                 *   *                *    *              ++
     +     *  *        +         *  *   +              *  *                +
  -1 ++-----**---------+----------**----+---------------**+---------------++
    -10               -5                0                 5                10

Answer 2

A very heavy and overpowered solution would be to install cernlib and use paw.

Answer 3

gnuplot is the definitive answer to your question.

I am personally also a big fan of the google chart API, which can be accessed from the command line with the help of wget (or curl) to download a png file (and view with xview or something similar). I like this option because I find the charts to be slightly prettier (i.e. better antialiasing).

Answer 4

If you know python, another good choice is to write a small script to use matplotlib.

Answer 5

You should use gnuplot and be sure to issue the command "set term dumb" after starting up. You can also give a row and column count. Here is the output from gnuplot if you issue "set term dumb 64 10" and then "plot sin(x)":

 

    1 ++-----------****-----------+--***-------+------****--++
  0.6 *+          **+  *          +**   *      sin(x)*******++
  0.2 +*         *      *         **     **         *     **++
    0 ++*       **       *       **       *       **       *++
 -0.4 ++**     *         **     **         *      *         *+
 -0.8 ++ **   *     +      *   ** +         *  +**          +*
   -1 ++--****------+-------***---+----------****-----------++
     -10           -5             0            5             10

It looks better at 79x24 (don't use the 80th column on an 80x24 display: some curses implementations don't always behave well around the last column).

I'm using gnuplot v4, but this should work on slightly older or newer versions.