Introduction

GNUPLOT is a command-driven interactive function plotting program. It is case sensitive (commands and function names written in lowercase are not the same as those written in CAPS). All command names may be abbreviated, as long as the abbreviation is not ambiguous. Any number of commands may appear on a line, separated by semicolons (;). Strings are indicated with quotes. They may be either single or double quotation marks, e.g.,

         load "filename"
         cd 'dir'

Any command-line arguments are assumed to be names of files containing GNUPLOT commands, with the exception of standard X11 arguments, which are processed first. Each file is loaded with the load command, in the order specified. GNUPLOT exits after the last file is processed. When no load files are named, gnuplot enters into an interactive mode.

Commands may extend over several input lines, by ending each line but the last with a backslash ( \). The backslash must be the LAST character on each line. The effect is as if the backslash and newline were not there. That is, no white space is implied, nor is a comment terminated. Therefore, commenting out a continued line comments out the entire command (see comment).

In this documentation, curly braces ({}) denote optional arguments to many commands, and a vertical bar (|) separates mutually exclusive choices. GNUPLOT keywords or help topics are indicated by backquotes or boldface (where available). Angle brackets (<>) are used to mark replaceable tokens.

For help on any topic, type help followed by the name of the topic.

The new GNUPLOT user should begin by reading about the plot command (type help plot).