Hello All, I am a newbie. I've been a round PERL for a while but never had to really get down to the nitty gritty of it. I am not a programmer and usually troll around looking for answers. Today I created a random number generator in hopes to pipe the output into a histogram set for plotting in GNUPLOT. While I understand how to generate a hash to tally the points, I am totally lost on creating bins, whether automatically spaced or with an argument from the user. Here is the code that I have so far:

Random number generator: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict ;

my $samplesize = $ARGV[0] ;
my $max        = $ARGV[1] ;

chomp(my $prog = `basename $0`) ;

if ($#ARGV < 1)
{
  print "\nUsage: ./randomnumber.pl <samplesize> <max num>\n" ;
  exit ;
}


for (my $i = 0; $i<$samplesize; $i++)
{
  my $range = $max ;
  my $random_number = int(rand($range)) - $max/2;
  print "$random_number \n";
}

[download]
Histogram creator: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict ;


my %bin ;
my %size;
my %value ;
my $max = 0 ;
my $min = 0 ;
my $count ;


while ( <STDIN> ) 
{
   my @line= split  ;
   my $element = $line[0] ;
   $value{$element}++ ;
}



foreach my $i (sort {$a<=>$b} keys %value)
{
  if ($i > $max)
  {
    $max = $i ;
  }
  if ($i < $min)
  {
    $min = $i ;
  }
}

[download]
So if there are values -1, -1.5, -2, 2, 1, 0, 1, I would hope to see the following (if the bin range was between -2:2)

(-2) 3

(0) 1

(2) 3

Or something like that... Thanks in advance.

In reply to Help with Histograms by cmr72

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