BioinformaticsOnline

If you're not sure what GnuPlot is, here's a quick introduction, courtesy of gnuplot.info:

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility for UNIX, IBM OS/2, MS Windows, DOS, Macintosh, VMS, Atari and many other platforms.

Gnuplot supports many types of plots in either 2D and 3D. It can draw using lines, points, boxes, contours, vector fields, surfaces, and various associated text. It also supports various specialized plot types.

Basically, it's a pretty useful utility for plotting data - great! Now let's get on with how you use it.

First things first. Lets find out if GnuPlot is installed on your system. If you are running windows or OS X then, unless you have installed it, it won't be there. On linux, depending upon your system, you may or may not have it - run the following at the command-line to see if you have it (as always - ignore the numbers, they are just there to indicate line numbering):

This is the first in what is going to be a (fingers crossed) long line of tutorials and tips and tricks that users of this site find and use throughout the course of their days. Anyway - lets get on with the rest of the story!

rsync is a Unix command-line based remote update protocol. Basically what this means is that it is an intelligent file transfer protocol - the intelligent part being that it allows the transfer of just the differences between two sets of files. Sounds technical... but it's not really that complicated and can be very useful. Here's a couple of potential use cases: