Basic Scripting with Awk and Gnuplot

Beware when piping awk | gnuplot or especially awk | awk: when printing numbers, awk by default prints them with something like %.6g, which can lose important amounts of precision. There are two ways this can happen. Firstly when numbers are implicitly converted to strings, eg for concatenation; and secondly when they are printed directly. These conversations are controlled by two different variables which may be set to printf directives to get higher precision.

I note with interest the article links to: https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html

Very succinct quickstart guide.

I want to use gnuplot more, but I generally find myself spending too much time messing with the plot styles to get something I sort of like.

Can anyone point to some pretty styles they've come across?

Here is one I used a while ago: Pretty Plots with Gnuplot [0]

[0]: https://edg.uchicago.edu/tutorials/pretty_plots_with_gnuplot...

There is no need to initialize variables with -v. You could just do:

    awk '/Time/{printf("%d %s ", ++j, $3)} ...