But both require depending on a third party library -- hardly something on a whim if ASCII bar charts do the job?

Sure but, e.g., sparklines can show me the shape of my 60 numbers[1] more effectively on a single line of 60 characters[2] than an ASCII bar chart which would be 60 lines (without binning).

[1] 27623 14272 22218 21267 19037 989 27116 32405 23261 27104 7793 9432 7776 28832 13521 10783 29261 32193 30367 20358 22611 2023 19607 9844 3516 6510 16533 8378 22986 17043 14628 13392 22799 23847 29212 23690 17779 17059 28211 26180 32061 22740 7911 12018 4508 9801 9578 15350 9554 15517 11112 405 22054 2743 26609 7843 713 10975 2830 1126

[2] http://rjp-hosted-files.s3.amazonaws.com/sparkline-demo.png

gnuplot is an alternative that is available on almost as many systems as awk, and can do the job as well

edit: this prompted me to write up a little note showing how: https://notes.billmill.org/visualization/graphs/gnuplot/A_ba...

If you do this sort of thing more than once ever, look at the feedgnuplot tool (http://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot). It'll make your life easier

Neat! Once you're installing something to do terminal plots though, https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot looks the nicest I've seen.

(The nice feature of feedgnuplot of course is that you can _also_ render the plots to images, which youplot can't)

> which youplot can't

But you could feed them through `textimg`[1] to generate PNGs.

[1] https://github.com/jiro4989/textimg

lol, I love it