Re: [Gnuplot-info] abort/continue plotting on error

[seb_kramm <seb...@ya...>]

On 04/27/2013 05:54 AM, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Friday, 26 April 2013, seb_kramm wrote:
>> Currently, when chaining different plot commands in a script, it seems that gnuplot
>> aborts when encountering a error (unreadable data file, in my case).
>> Is there any way to tell gnuplot not to abort and to move on to the next 'plot'
>> command ? I searched the manual but found nothing about error handling.
>
> There is no general mechanism for continuing to execute a script after an error.

Thanks, indeed this would be a non trivial thing to adress.

>> The situation is as follows: I have many plots to draw from many computer-generated
>> data files. The script file is itself generated. Now, some data files are ill formed
>> or non-existent, due to some experimental error (say, the program that generates the
>> data crashes).
>> But I would like to have the plots for all the other datafiles.
>
> How about
>
>    expected_file = "filename"
>    stat = system("wc ".expected_file)
>    if (stat ne "") {
>       plot expected_file
>    }
>
> If you want to test for a file that exists but is too short to
> contain the expected data:
>
>    stat = system("wc ".expected_file)
>    if (stat ne ""  &&  int(word(stat,1)) > min_size) {
>      plot expected_file
>    }

Woaw, really clever trick, I didn't realize you could call shell commands from within 
gnuplot. I will implement this, but the second version will not apply, as my data 
files don't always have the same number of data points.
Thank you Ethan.

Sebastien Kramm