I've always avoided gnuplot because it has looked pretty hard to get anything useful out of. But uplot looks much more approachable. Just piping some data to "uplot hist --nbins 20" is something I'll remember.
ls -l \
| awk '$5 < 100000 {print $5}' \
| feedgnuplot \
--histo 0 \
--binwidth 5000 \
--xlabel 'File size (bytes)' \
--ylabel Frequency \
--terminal 'dumb 120 40' \
--unset grid
45 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| * * + + + + + + + |
| * * |
| * * |
40 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
35 |*** * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
30 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
25 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
20 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
15 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
10 |-+* * +-|
| * * |
| * * |
| * * |
5 |-+* ******** +-|
| * * * ******** |
| * * ******** ********************** ******** * |
| * * + * * + * * + * ******* * + * + + ******** |
0 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000 70000 80000
File size (bytes)
Feedgnuplot is really slick.
https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot
It's in the debian repos too.
gnuplot> plot '<pipeline'
You do have 2 different history logs this way - the shell one and the plot one while the uplot way is integrated.
If you really want integrated, you could drive gnuplot with temp files, though each shell command-line would probably have to pass a lot of controls. E.g.,
#!/bin/sh
cat > /tmp/dat # should use mktemp -d
cat > /tmp/p.gpi <<-EOF
plot '/tmp/dat' $*
EOF
gnuplot /tmp/p.gpi
$ seq 1 10 | gpl with lines
In the unlikely event temp space is actually any sort of issue then you might be able to use mkfifo (I've never tried) or else generate a .gpi script that uses the plot '<string' syntax escaping `string`.
seq 1 10 | gnuplot -e "plot '<cat' with lines"
gnuplot -e "set terminal sixelgd;plot '<&3' with lines" 3< <(seq 1 10)
seq 1 10 | gnuplot -e 'plot "-"'