Question

I know how to make a histogram in gnuplot, but all the instructions I’ve seen are valid when the data is located in a single file. My problem is that my data spans several files. Is there any way to do this with gnuplot?

Answer 1

Not really. Gnuplot is really only good at dealing with one file at a time. However, there are many useful external tools which could combine the files together for you:

plot "<magic_external_tool file1 file2 file3 file4 ..."  ...

of course your choice of external tool is a question of how your files are formatted already. If the standbys (awk, sed, join, cat …) don’t work, I often rely on python to write a quick script to do the job, but I’m sure many other people would use something like perl or java. It really doesn’t matter what tool you use, as long as you can coax it to write a properly formatted file to standard output, you’re golden.