Stopping Gnuplot from flashing a plot window and disappear

In Ubuntu/Debian, Gnuplot tends to use terminal 'X11' if no terminal has been defined before the 'plot' command. The reason for not specifying a terminal could be various (eg. being lazy and ignorant, subsequent use of 'replot' command using other terminal types in several other scripts)

In my case I had a loop of 5x5x5x5 times in my NS-2 script invoking Gnuplot 6 times with every run. The flashing window literally leaves the screen unusable as the Gnuplot X11 terminal window keeps popping up and out in a blink.

A temporary fix (which doesn't require rewriting my whole Gnuplot script set) is to use:

set terminal unknown

Doing this stops the flash with the first 'plot' command. The subsequent 'replot' commands can define their own terminals as needed.

Gnuplot: skipping header line from input data file

The trick is in gnuplot command - "every"

The syntax of "every" is:

plot 'file' every {point_incr}

{:{block_incr}

{:{start_point}

{:{start_block}

{:{end_point}

{:end_block}}}}}

So, in order to skip the first two lines the gnuplot command would be:

plot "data.txt" using 1:5 every ::2 with linespoints linestyle 7

This will skip the first line of the data file

Tab, Newline and other tricks in Gnuplot graph title

Example:

plot 'data.txt' using 1:2 with lines points title sprintf("AAA vs. BBB \n (2nd line)")

Adding more tics to gnuplot graphs

set xtic 10
set ytic 100