[vox-tech] tell gnuplot to use a single X11 window

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Monday 23 May 2005 03:03 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Mon 23 May 05,  2:55 PM, Dylan Beaudette <dylan at iici.no-ip.org> said:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > is there any good way to get gnuplot to send its output to a single
> > window, such that any successive plots update an existing X11 window?
> >
> > i have looked over the gnuplot man page, and can't seem to find what i am
> > looking for.
> >
> > while it is a little ridiculous, i like to keep track of my progress
> > while writting with this little script:
> >
> > while `true`; do wc -w main.tex | awk '{print $1}' >> word_count ;\
> > echo "set ylab 'words'; set xlab 'minutes'; \
> > plot 'word_count' with lines notitle" | gnuplot -persist;\
> > sleep 60; done
> >
> > this produces a nice little graph updated once a minute. however, gnuplot
> > on linux produces a new window with every plot. on OSX it is possible to
> > keep all output in a single window* .
> >
> > * there is a bit of a difference on OSX, as an application called
> > AquaTerm is being used to render the output, not X11.
> >
> > any ideas on how to do this with regular X11?
> >
> > thanks!
>
> I had the same problem.  My fix was to write a small perl script to wrap
> around gnuplot.
>
> The script writes a small gnuplot script and then invokes gnuplot with the
> script.
>
> When it comes time for a new plot, the script rewrites the gnuplot script,
> kills all instances of gnuplot, and re-runs gnuplot with the new gnuplot
> script.
>
> It works surprisingly well.
>
> Pete
>
> PS- The data is output of a time evolution partial differential equation.
> It creates a "movie" of the time evolution of a quantum wavefunction.  Very
> cool.

Cool!

thanks for the tip Pete. I will give it a try tonight (this thing is due in a 
couple of hours!) when i have some time.

any demos of the output that you mentioned?

Thanks,

-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341