Gnuplotting data without a textfile

Question

My program generates bash scripts that call gnuplot. I don't want to have to make an extra file to store the data; is there any way I can explicitly call all of the values? Or possibly having bash make a temporary file.

Something like

plot {(1,5),(2,10),(3,1)}

is what I am looking for.

Answer 1

You should be able to pipe the commands into gnuplot on stdin.

Answer 2

You can use the syntax for inline data - filename '-'.

The following example produces a simple plot in a GIF image (bash script):

gnuplot << EOF
set terminal gif
set output 'plot1.gif'
plot '-' using 1:2
        1 10
        2 20
        3 32
        4 40
        5 50
        e
EOF