Plotting from the command line — a new version of ‘graph’

I’ve forked the GNU ‘plotutils’ package, written mostly by Rob Maier, which contains the ‘graph’ program. I’ve added new features to ‘graph’ to make it a better tool for producing plots from the Linux/Unix/macOS command line.

My main motivation is to use it with my Software for Flexible Bayesian Modeling (FBM), which consists of a set of programs to be run from the command line. One crucial FBM program is ‘net-plt’, which displays information from a log file for an MCMC run of a Bayesian neural network model. Here’s an example use of ‘graph’ to display the average squared error on training and test cases with networks from an MCMC run that is used as an example in the FBM documentation:

net-plt t bB rlog.net | graph -n

And here is the resulting plot: