Re: files for plotting given by string function

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 15 June 2005 09:43 am, Lutz Maibaum wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if it would be feasible to include shell-like wildcard 
> expansion into gnuplot. For example
>   plot "a.*.dat"
> 
> Is it possible to do this in a platform-independent way? I currently use the 
> little script "pl" (http://www.phys.uni-paderborn.de/~stern/pl/) to use the 
> globbing features of the shell, but there are quite a few things that would 
> be much easier to do in an interactive gnuplot session.

With the bleeding-edge cvs patch from Juergen Wieferink to implement a
system() call, you could use a similar perlscript to do something along
the lines of:

  set macros
  file_list = system("ls -1 a.*.dat | dirlist.pl")
  plot @file_list


where dirlist.pl is a cleaned up version of this quick perl hack
(which leaves a missing " at the start of the line and an extra ," at the end,
but you get the idea)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
  while (<>) {
	s/\n/", "/;
	print;
  }


In fact, if you use the equally bleeding-edge substring manipulation code
you can do the cleanup inside gnuplot. The following actually works
when run in the source directory using yesterday's cvs version with
Juergen's patch:

  set macros
  file_list = system("ls -1 ../demo/?.dat | ./dirlist.pl")
  file_list = "\"".file_list
  file_list = file_list[0:strlen(file_list)-4]

  plot @file_list


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195