Creating graphs

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Platform: solaris 9 x86

I want to be able to create excel like line graphs with basic input data and use it on a webpage or worst case so I can use it to insert to a document

type of input file I would have, example below

datainput.txt:

date,requests,failures,success
20100501,80,10,70
20100502,75,5,70
20100503,85,25,60
20100504,66,6,60

I know there are various freeware tools to help but I don't have any experience with them and need some help.

Preferably could someone advise for free ware tool I could use and an example of how to use it graphing the data from input file such as the example above

can you help?
I am used to ksh scripting and the various flavours of unix.
Any help would b appreciated.

2

Hi,
have a look at GNUPlot, gnuplot homepage, that has helped me a lot before. Easy to use in any script based context.

Best regards,
Lakris

3

Thanks

any chance you can post example of data file you had and commands you used with gnuplot to plot the data and get output?

4

Have a look at PSPP: GNU PSPP It is intended as a free replacement for the proprietory software package SPSS and can produce a number of graphs including histograms, pie-charts and box-plots. It supports delimited & fixed-width text, SPSS .sav files and a number of other input file formats. It can also output to HTML (among other formats) and the accompanying documentation is very well written.

5

try MRTG - Tobi Oetiker's MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher

6

Hi!
Sure. Here's a very trivial example; I weighed myself a few times, usually morning and afternoon, recorded the weights with date in a file like this, file vikt.dat:

2009-Dec-14_17:21 87.70  88.50
2009-Dec-17_08:27 87.65  88.75
2009-Dec-17_14:17 87.80  88.55
2009-Dec-18_10:23 87.40  88.30
2009-Dec-18_14:21 88.45  87.65
2009-Dec-18_19:13 88.25  87.75
2009-Dec-19_08:18 87.50  87.60
2009-Dec-19_13:54 87.75  87.25
2009-Dec-20_14:36 87.90  87.30
2009-Dec-21_15:32 88.90  87.45
2009-Dec-21_16:55 88.00  89.20
2009-Jan-07_14:48 88.05  87.95
2009-Jan-09_11:41 88.50  87.65

Then I used this script for gnuplot to plot the data into a line graph, vikt.plot:

set xdata time  # The x axis data is time
set timefmt "%Y-%b-%d_%H:%M"
set format x "%d %b"
with linespoint
plot [] [85:91]  'vikt.dat' using 1:2 with linespoint

and call the script from the command line or a script with:

gnuplot -p vikt.plot

And there are as You can see on their web site, lot's of formats for graphs, ability to export to different graphic file formats, etc, this is just a very simple example.

Best regards,
Lakris

PS I have used it professionally as well :wink: