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Alien-Gnuplot-1.001
River stage one • 2 direct dependents • 4 total dependents
/ Alien::Gnuplot

OVERVIEW

Alien::Gnuplot is intended for distribution via CPAN. This repository stores the history for the Alien::Gnuplot module on CPAN. Install the module via CPAN.

NAME

Alien::Gnuplot - Find and verify functionality of the gnuplot executable.

SYNOPSIS

package MyGnuplotter;

use strict;

use Alien::Gnuplot;

$gnuplot = $Alien::Gnuplot::executable;

`$gnuplot < /tmp/plotfile`;

1;

DESCRIPTION

Alien::Gnuplot verifies existence and sanity of the gnuplot external application. It only declares one access method, Alien::Gnuplot::load_gnuplot, which does the actual work and is called automatically at load time. Alien::Gnuplot doesn't have any actual plotting methods - making use of gnuplot, once it is found and verified, is up to you or your client module.

Using Alien::Gnuplot checks for existence of the executable, and sets several global variables:

  • $Alien::Gnuplot::executable gets the path to the executable that was found.

  • $Alien::Gnuplot::version gets the self-reported version number of the executable.

  • $Alien::Gnuplot::pl gets the self-reported patch level.

  • @Alien::Gnuplot::terms gets a list of the names of all supported terminal devices

  • %Alien::Gnuplot::terms gets a key for each supported terminal device; values are the 1-line description from gnuplot.

  • @Alien::Gnuplot::colors gets a list of the names of all named colors recognized by this gnuplot.

  • %Alien::Gnuplot::colors gets a key for each named color; values are the #RRGGBB form of the color.

You can point Alien::Gnuplot to a particular path for gnuplot, by setting the environment variable GNUPLOT_BINARY to the path.

If there is no executable application in your path or in the location pointed to by GNUPLOT_BINARY, then the module throws an exception. You can also verify that it has not completed successfully, by examining $Alien::Gnuplot::version, which is undefined in case of failure and contains the gnuplot version string on success.

If you think the global state of the gnuplot executable may have changed, you can either reload the module or explicitly call Alien::Gnuplot::load_gnuplot() to force a fresh inspection of the executable.

INSTALLATION STRATEGY

When you install Alien::Gnuplot, it checks that gnuplot itself is installed as well. If it is not, then Alien::Gnuplot attempts to use one of several common package managers to install gnuplot for you. If it can't find one of those, if dies (and refuses to install), printing a friendly message about how to get gnuplot before throwing an error.

In principle, gnuplot could be automagically downloaded and built, but it is distributed via Sourceforge -- which obfuscates interior links, making such tools surprisingly difficult to write.

REPOSITORIES

Alien::Gnuplot development is at "http://github.com/drzowie/Alien-Gnuplot".

Gnuplot's main home page is at "http://www.gnuplot.info", and the source code tarball in src is downloaded from there.

AUTHOR

Craig DeForest <craig@deforest.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2013 by Craig DeForest

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.