Hi I'd like to make an animation that illustrates the positions of some agents I'm simulating under Linux. Basically, I have some files named file00001.dat, file00002.dat and so on. I have to generate "something" that get files in order, and output an animated gif, a dynamic graph or whatever, that simulates the moving reading data from file.
I have control on the files, meaning that I can put identifiers or everything I want.
How would you achieve that? What programs would you use?
In linux, gnuplot is the old standby. And it can do animated gif's as well.
There are many choices, but in general matplotlib is a good one. It is a python library, so you have powerful libraries available to fine-tune or analyse your data set if you want to go beyond just quick plots. For very simple stuff you can always use the pyplot module from matplotlib that has many commands known from MATLAB or gnuplot.
For producing animations see this question.
As an added plus its default outputs are much better than e.g. gnuplot's or plotutils'.