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Question

I have data file of the form:

unimportant1      unimportant2    unimportant3     matrixdata[i]
1e4               2e5             3e2              1 2 3 4 5
2e3               1e1             7e3              5 4 3 2 1
...               ...             ...              ...
2e3               1e4             4e2              4 4 4 4 4

So it has columnheaders (here "unimportant1" to "unimportant3") as the first row. I want gnuplot to ignore these first three unimportant columns columns so the data entries in exponential notation. I want gnuplot to plot the matrixdata as a matrix. So as if I did it like this:

#!/usr/bin/gnuplot -p
plot '-' matrix with image
1 2 3 4 5
5 4 3 2 1
...
4 4 4 4 4
e

How do I get gnuplot to ignore the first three columns and the header row and plot the rest as matrix image? For compatibility, I would prefere a gnuplot built-in to do that, but I could write a shell script and use the `plot '< ...' syntax preprocessing the data file.

Edit: So neuhaus' answer almost solved it. The only thing I'm missing is, how to ignore the first row (line) with the text header data. Every seems to expect numeric data and so the whole plot fails as it's not a matrix. I don't want to comment out the fist line, as I'm using the unimportant data sets for other 2D plots that, in turn, use the header data.

So how do I skip a row in a matrix plot that already uses every to skip columns?

Answer

You could probably use shell commands, for instance, the following skips the first six lines of a file:

plot '<tail -n +7 terrain0.dem' matrix with image