1.19 Start-up

When ‘gnuplot‘ is run, it looks for an initialization file to load. This file is called ‘.gnuplot‘ on Unix and AmigaOS systems, and ‘GNUPLOT.INI‘ on other systems. If this file is not found in the current directory, the program will look for it in the HOME directory (under AmigaOS, MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2, the environment variable ‘GNUPLOT‘ should contain the name of this directory; on Windows NT, it will use ‘USERPROFILE‘ if GNUPLOT isn’t defined). Note: if NOCWDRC is defined during the installation, ‘gnuplot‘ will not read from the current directory.

If the initialization file is found, ‘gnuplot‘ executes the commands in it. These may be any legal ‘gnuplot‘ commands, but typically they are limited to setting the terminal and defining frequently-used functions or variables.