Display image from Graphviz without creating an intermediate file?

Question

I would like to display a graph without writing a file first.

Suppose I have a command foo that produces this on standard out:

digraph foogrph {
   a -> b;
   a -> c;
}

What I would like to do is pipe foo into dot and then pipe the results into a command that will display the image in a graphical environment.

foo | dot -Tpng | <display command>

I have found a workaround that involves temporary files. In OSX, I can do the following:

foo | dot -Tpng > temp && open temp

But I still have to remove the file from the filesystem.

How can I display an image that is being written to standard out?

Tom Blodget · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-13 00:19:49Z

17

With ImageMagick's display command, these work on Ubuntu 12.10 (and most likely other OSes, too):

dot abac.dot -Tsvg | display
dot abac.dot -Tpng | display

SVG has the advantage of smoothly scaling with the window (if that's what you want).

answered Apr 13, 2013 at 0:19

Tom Blodget

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3 Comments

tlehman Over a year ago

I had to recompile imagemagick on OSX to use X11, I have display working now, but it doesn't read from a pipe correctly. I found a workaround though: display <(echo 'digraph { a->b; b->c; c->d; }' | dot -Tpng)

tlehman Over a year ago

Another option is to use dotty, examples here at the git wiki

tlehman Over a year ago

Also the imgcat script that works with iTerm can display the image directly at the terminal, it's pretty sweet :)

Craig Ringer · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-14 04:17:47Z

3

On Linux you can also just use -Tx11:cairo to display a direct X11 window.

answered Dec 14, 2018 at 4:17

Craig Ringer

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2 Comments

CMCDragonkai Over a year ago

I tried this and this just produced a big white blank window.

Welgriv Over a year ago

okay but how can you display the graph without using a file ?

jake256 · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-20 01:03:03Z

3

On OSX & iTerm2, you can do the following (assuming imgcat is installed)

dot abac.dot -Tpng | imgcat

answered Feb 20, 2019 at 1:03

jake256

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Comments

Welgriv · Accepted Answer · 2021-11-23 14:08:27Z

1

To complete the accepted answer (which is totally OK), if one want to also avoid using a .dot file :

echo 'digraph { a -> b }' | dot -Tpng | display

(this is for linux only, also I first tried eog that doesn't seem accepting pngs through pipes)

Adapted from rom the documentation of graphviz command line usage.

answered Nov 23, 2021 at 14:08

Welgriv

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