If you feed gnuplot its commands from the unix command line, you can also pipe data to it from another program, like zcat
which reads in a gzipped file and prints it out, e.g.:
zcat datafile.gz | gnuplot -p -e 'plot "-" u 1:2'
EDIT:
Apparently, in place of a filename, you can give gnuplot's plot
command a shell command to run and use the output of. Just put a <
in front:
plot "< zcat datafile.gz" u 1:2
You should be able to use that multiple times to do what you want.
(Answer courtesy of
philipp.janert on the 'Gnuplot in Action' forum http://www.manning-sandbox.com/message.jspa?messageID=77092)
What if I'm not using the command line? I often automatically generate gnuplot commands in a command file that references data in several files – pythonic metaphor – 2011-10-03T18:57:56.040