# Re: ruby/gnuplot on windows

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ruby-gnuplot-on-windows/94897>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [May 17, 2006, 9:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ruby-gnuplot-on-windows/94897 "2006-05-17T09:50:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2006, 9:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ruby-gnuplot-on-windows/94897/1 "2006-05-17T09:50:06Z")

</div>

Dear Jon,

I tried what I wrote to you yesterday on Cygwin/Windows and it worked  
there.  
Now, I have tried

gnuplot -persist g.plt´

where g.plt is a file containing just the line

plot sin(x)

and this works - without the persist, the plot disappears  
instantaneously, as  
you mentioned.

## Cygwin is a free, open-source attempt to make Unix run on Windows XP – I have been using it for several years now along with various Linuxes

most of the time things work, sometimes it drives me crazy, but by far  
not  
as much as Windows does. You can get it here:

\_[http://www.cygwin.com/\_](http://www.cygwin.com/_) ([http://www.cygwin.com/](http://www.cygwin.com/)) .

Of course, Ruby will run on it. But I don’t know whether they have the  
newest version available as a binary. I installed Ruby by downloading  
the  
tar-file from  
Ruby’s website, decompressed it  
using

gunzip ruby\*.zip  
tar xvf ruby_tar  
cd ruby_  
./configure  
make  
make install

- so just the usual procedure…

Best regards,

Axel

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2006, 8:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ruby-gnuplot-on-windows/94897/2 "2006-05-17T20:51:09Z")

</div>

unknown wrote:

> Dear Jon,
> 
> I tried what I wrote to you yesterday on Cygwin/Windows and it worked  
> there.  
> Now, I have tried
> 
> gnuplot -persist g.plt´

Axel,

I have always used windows and am not very familiar with Unix. How much  
of a learning curve would there be to use cygwin? Gnuplot is supposed  
to work with windows and most of it does. For some reason, I just can’t  
get a window to stay open. What is strange is that the pause command  
doesn’t work either, but all the other commands like plot etc…work.  
I’ll give cygwin a try, but that might be more difficult for me than  
figuring out the original problem. Thanks for taking the time to help  
me with this problem. I really appreciate it.

Jon