1.12 Environment

A number of shell environment variables are understood by ‘gnuplot‘. None of these are required, but may be useful.

If GNUTERM is defined, it is used as the name of the terminal type to be used. This overrides any terminal type sensed by ‘gnuplot‘ on start-up, but is itself overridden by the .gnuplot (or equivalent) start-up file (see ‘start-up‘) and, of course, by later explicit changes.

GNUHELP may be defined to be the pathname of the HELP file (gnuplot.gih).

On VMS, the logical name GNUPLOT$HELP should be defined as the name of the help library for ‘gnuplot‘. The ‘gnuplot‘ help can be put inside any system help library, allowing access to help from both within and outside ‘gnuplot‘ if desired.

On Unix, HOME is used as the name of a directory to search for a .gnuplot file if none is found in the current directory. On AmigaOS, MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2, GNUPLOT is used. On Windows, the NT-specific variable USERPROFILE is tried, too. VMS, SYS$LOGIN: is used. Type ‘help start-up‘.

On Unix, PAGER is used as an output filter for help messages.

On Unix and AmigaOS, SHELL is used for the shell command. On MS-DOS and OS/2, COMSPEC is used for the shell command.

FIT_SCRIPT may be used to specify a ‘gnuplot‘ command to be executed when a fit is interrupted—see fit. FIT_LOG specifies the default filename of the logfile maintained by fit.

GNUPLOT_LIB may be used to define additional search directories for data and command files. The variable may contain a single directory name, or a list of directories separated by a platform-specific path separator, eg. ’:’ on Unix, or ’;’ on DOS/Windows/OS/2/Amiga platforms. The contents of GNUPLOT_LIB are appended to the loadpath variable, but not saved with the save and ‘save set‘ commands.

Several gnuplot terminal drivers access TrueType fonts via the gd library. For these drivers the font search path is controlled by the environmental variable GDFONTPATH. Furthermore, a default font for these drivers may be set via the environmental variable GNUPLOT_DEFAULT_GDFONT.

The postscript terminal uses its own font search path. It is controlled by the environmental variable GNUPLOT_FONTPATH. The format is the same as for GNUPLOT_LIB. The contents of GNUPLOT_FONTPATH are appended to the fontpath variable, but not saved with the save and ‘save set‘ commands.

GNUPLOT_PS_DIR is used by the postscript driver to use external prologue files. Depending on the build process, gnuplot contains either a builtin copy of those files or simply a default hardcoded path. Use this variable to test the postscript terminal with custom prologue files. See ‘postscript prologue‘.