About clichart

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a chart (or graph) is worth 10,000 lines of data.

Clichart is a tool for quick visualisation of tabular data on the command line by generating and displaying charts. It can:

  • Display charts in a window, save them to disk (JPEG or PNG), or both
  • Accept data in comma- or whitespace-separated formats
  • Read data from a file, or have it piped into its standard input
  • Display XY line charts, with the X axis based on dates, times or values. The Y axis must be simple values (integer or decimal)
  • Be used interactively, or driven via scripts.
Probably the easiest way to get a feel for what clichart can do, and whether it's of interest to you, is to look at the quick start guide.

Clichart was originally developed for interactive charting of data from server log files, so its primary audience is probably software developers and system administrators.

The project also includes other tools (linestats, discretestats and mid) to help generate summary data from log files and other textual data. If you're using Java, you can also use clichart as a library.

Sample output from clichart

Here's a sample chart generated by clichart, from a CSV file extracted from data in a system log (click the image to see the full-size chart). Sample chart

The command-line required to generate the chart was:

    clichart -fcl 0,1,2,3 -t "Processing of Foo Requests - 12 Feb 2006" \
            -y "Requests per minute"  system.log.2006-02-12.fooRates.csv
And bear in mind that most of the command-line is titles and other prettiness, so it's pretty simple and quick.

Here's a more involved chart, including a second Y axis displayed as a bar. Sample chart 2

Requirements for running clichart

Clichart requires Java version 1.4 (aka Java 4) and above. However, Java 1.5 or 1.6 (aka Java 5 and 6) are better choices (i.e. run faster). Clichart should run whereever Java does, but it gets tested on Linux and Windows.

The additional tools for generation of tabular data require Python 2.2 or above, and should run anywhere.

Installation is simple - see here for details.

Download and Forums

Clichart is hosted on SourceForge - you'll find the project download page here.

SourceForge also has the project forum pages, which are a great place to ask questions and find answers.

Quick start with clichart

The quick start page will give you a fast run through the tools in clichart, so you can see them in action. The page also has examples of the output from running against data in the samples directory provided with clichart.

Installing clichart

Mostly, all you have to do is unzip the package. See the installation page for more information.

Documentation

See the project documentation index.

Licence

Clichart is licenced under the GNU Lesser (or Library) Public Licence. See the LICENCE.txt file for details.

Contact Me

My name's John Dickson. I'm an architect for server-side Java systems, and I seem to have spent far too much of my life looking at logs to try to understand what the system was doing at particular moments. Clichart grew out of that experience.

You can get in touch with me at the email address: 'captsens at gmail dot com'. I'd love to hear whether clichart scratches your itch, and if not why not.