---
name: "gsl-histogram"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "gsl"
version: "2.8-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/gsl-histogram"
---

# gsl-histogram(1)

compute histogram of data on stdin

## NAME

gsl-histogram - compute histogram of data on stdin

## SYNOPSYS

**gsl-histogram xmin xmax \[n\]**

## DESCRIPTION

**gsl-histogram** is a demonstration program for the GNU Scientific Library. It takes three arguments, specifying the upper and lower bounds of the histogram and the number of bins.  It then reads numbers from \`stdin', one line at a time, and adds them to the histogram.  When there is no more data to read it prints out the accumulated histogram using gsl\_histogram\_fprintf.  If n is unspecified then bins of integer width are used.

## EXAMPLE

Here is an example.  We generate 10000 random samples from a Cauchy distribution with a width of 30 and histogram them over the range -100 to 100, using 200 bins.

     gsl-randist 0 10000 cauchy 30 \| gsl-histogram -100 100 200 \> histogram.dat

A plot of the resulting histogram will show the familiar shape of the Cauchy distribution with fluctuations caused by the finite sample size.

     awk '{print $1, $3 ; print $2, $3}' histogram.dat \| graph -T X

## SEE ALSO

**[gsl(3)](/gsl/3.md)**, **[gsl-randist(1)](/gsl-randist/1.md)**.

## AUTHOR

**gsl-histogram** was written by Brian Gough. Copyright 1996-2000; for copying conditions see the GNU General Public Licence.

This manual page was added by the Dirk Eddelbuettel \<edd@debian.org\>, the Debian GNU/Linux maintainer for **GSL**.