how to make several plots from the same standard input data in gnuplot?

Question

I want to have a single .plt file storing both data and gnuplot commands. My data looks like

# x1 y1 x2 y2
  1  2  3  4
  5  6  7  8

and co

Answer 1

I'm not sure how much you can edit the file, but the tidiest way is probably to put the whole thing in a shell script/batch script (are you on linux or windows?)

On linux I do something like this

#!/bin/bash

#put my data in a file
echo "
# x1 y1 x2 y2
  1  2  3  4
  5  6  7  8
" > my_dat.dat

#launch gnuplot
gnuplot<

Then I chmod +wrx the file I put the above commands in and run.

Note: there also seems to be a similarity to this question:

gnuplot stdin, how to plot two lines?

So you might want to look there too