Calliope Sounds: In praise of gnuplot's dumb terminal support

I have to say, again, I find gnuplot's dumb terminal support is so useful when you are at the command line and need to see a plot of some data. The plot is very rough but this is usually enough to give you enough insight into the data as to whether or not to continue to exploring it. The script I am using now is

#!/bin/bash

function show_usage {
 echo \
  usage: $(basename $0) \
  [-x label] \
  [-y label] \
  [-t title] \
  [-s width:height] \
  [-f time-format-strftime] \
  timeseries-input ...
}

function swap {
 echo $2 $1
}

function parse_size {
 W=$(expr $1 : "\\([0-9]*\\):[0-9]*")
 H=$(expr $1 : "[0-9]*:\\([0-9]*\\)")
 echo "$W $H"
}

TIMEFMT="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"
XLABEL="Time"
YLABEL="Units"
TITLE="Timeseries"
SIZE=$(swap $(stty size))

while getopts "x:y:t:f:s:h" opt
do
 case $opt in
  x) XLABEL=$OPTARG ;;
  y) YLABEL=$OPTARG ;;
  t) TITLE=$OPTARG ;;
  f) TIMEFMT=$OPTARG ;;
  s) SIZE=$(parse_size $OPTARG) ;;
  h) show_usage ; exit 0 ;;
  *) show_usage ; exit 1 ;;
 esac
done
shift $(expr $OPTIND - 1)

for INPUT in $*
do
 if [ "$INPUT" = "-" ]
 then
  INPUT=$(mktemp /tmp/timeplot.XXXXXXXXXX)
  cat > $INPUT
 fi

 gnuplot <<EOH
  set terminal dumb $SIZE
  set autoscale
  set xdata time
  set timefmt "$TIMEFMT"
  set xlabel "$XLABEL"
  set ylabel "$YLABEL"
  set title "$TITLE"
  plot "$INPUT" using 1:2 with lines
EOH
done

# END

For example, if the data in /tmp/data is

then this can be quickly plotted using

timeplot -f %Y /tmp/data

and get