Talking to gnuplot with C

In this and the next few recipes, we are going to demonstrate how to use gnuplot from within different programming languages. There are no illustrations for these recipes, as we are not giving examples of particular types of plots. We provide samples of code for several languages that you can modify to get started immediately incorporating gnuplot's plotting facilities into your programs.

The first example was chosen to demonstrate that we can use gnuplot from within almost any programming language, even if no specialized library exists for that purpose.

Getting ready

You need to have a C compiler installed to follow along here. Just about any Unix-type operating system, including Linux and Macintosh (if the Developer Tools have been installed) comes with one, and it is usually called gcc.

How to do it…

Compile the following program with gcc file.c, where file.c is the name of the file in which it is saved (the example distributed with this book that is named after...