How do I plot certain columns using xmgrace in the terminal?

Question

I want to write a bash script to automate the plotting of data, using a plotting tool called xmgrace, but I want to be able to select which columns are plotted.

Say in my data file I have 3 columns, with the x and y data in the 1st and 3rd columns. How do I plot x against y when the data is formatted this way?

I tried xmgrace -bxy [1:3] data but that didn't work, it said No block data read and treated the second column as the y values.

Answer 1

The correct syntax for this kind of problem is

xmgrace -block file -bxy 1:3 

This will

1. Read the file as a block file
2. Plot the 3rd column against the 1st column.

Answer 2

Another flexible way of accomplishing the same thing is to use awk or cut:

awk '{print $1,$3}' data | xmgrace -
cut -f1,3 data | xmgrace -