awkplot

awk piped to uplot for terminal-only plots that feel like writing awk on the command line.

The coding world is shifting its efforts to writing inscrutible Rust scripts. This is mistake. Speed? Type safety? Who needs it!

Instead, we should be reducing our cognitive burden by doing more analysis using the sweet, sweet awk syntax. Rust advocates will tremble when they see you enjoying a relaxing terminal session with awkplot, absolutely dominating tabular data.

awkplot [awkplot-opts] [awk-opts] 'awk program' [file ...]

What's the point of this?

Good question. You COULD just pipe awk to uplot yourself, but it just feels better doing it this way.

Dependencies

• awk or gawk
• youplot

Install

Option A — one-liner (macOS / Linux):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mtisza1/awkplot/main/install.sh | bash

The installer checks for python3, awk, and uplot, installs uplot via Homebrew (macOS) or RubyGems/apt (Linux) if missing, then drops awkplot into ~/.local/bin.

Customize with env vars:

# install to a different dir
AWKPLOT_PREFIX=/usr/local/bin curl -fsSL .../install.sh | bash

# skip dep installation (bring your own uplot)
AWKPLOT_SKIP_DEPS=1 curl -fsSL .../install.sh | bash

Option B — drop on PATH manually:

First, clone this repo.

chmod +x awkplot
cp awkplot awkplot_cli.py /usr/local/bin/   # or any dir on your PATH

Option C — pip:

pip install .

Flags

awk passthrough

Flag	Description
-F SEP	Field separator (forwarded to awk)
-v VAR=VAL	Variable assignment, repeatable
-f PROGFILE	Read awk program from file, repeatable

plot options

Flag	Description
-p TYPE	Plot type: hist bar line lineplot scatter density box count [default: hist]
-H	First output row is column headers
-c COLORS	Comma-separated color(s), e.g. red,blue
-s H:W	Plot height:width, e.g. 20:60
-t TITLE	Plot title
-d DELIM	Output column delimiter for uplot
--dry-run	Print the awk | uplot command without running it
--help	Show usage

Examples

# Histogram of column 3
awkplot -p hist '{print $3}' data.tsv

# Scatter from a CSV with headers, custom size and color
awkplot -F, -H -p scatter -c cyan -s 20:60 '{print $2, $5}' data.csv

# Filter then bar chart from stdin
cat data | awkplot -v t=10 -p bar '$1 > t {print $2, $3}'

# Awk program from a file
awkplot -f prog.awk -p line data.tsv

# Density plot with title
awkplot -p density -t "Response times" '{print $4}' access.log

# Preview the generated command without running it
awkplot --dry-run -F, -p scatter '{print $1,$2}' data.csv

How it works

awkplot builds two commands from your flags and runs them as a pipeline:

awk [awk-flags] 'program' [files]  |  uplot <type> [uplot-flags]

--dry-run prints the shell-quoted pipeline so you can inspect or tweak it.