is there a way in gnuplot to give a gif a more specific time title other than time.1, time.2 , time.3?

From an answer given here Gnuplot 3d time animation from data file I changed it a bit adding a filedata 2, now the problem is i have a filedata with

column1  column2      column3      column4
time       x            y            z
0          54           89            787
0.15       90           676           345
0.70       4593         34            387
3.78       59           37            904

and so on with other time positions data (actually in my .dat file I didn't write time x y z ,only the values). What I'd like to do is to take column 1 values and put its values in place of .j in 'time'.j. Is there a way to do it?

# define fixed axis-ranges
set xrange [-1:1]
set yrange [0:20]
set zrange [-1:1]

# filename and n=number of lines of your data 
filedata = 'data.dat'
n = system(sprintf('cat %s | wc -l', filedata))
 
do for [j=1:n] {
    set title 'time '.j
    splot filedata1 u 2:3:4 every ::1::j w l lw 2, \
          filedata1 u 2:3:4 every ::j::j w p pt 7 ps 2,\
          filedata2 u 2:3:4 every ::1::j w l lw 2, \
          filedata2 u 2:3:4 every ::j::j w p pt 7 ps 2
}

Actually as of now I don't know how to put it to work.

Solution

To summarize what I've understood from your question:

you have two files one with 4 columns (time,x,y,z) and the other with 3 columns (x,y,z)
I further assume that those files have the same number of rows and the rows of the second file correspond also to the time of the first file
you want to animate the trajectories from both files with a label containing the time from the column 1 of the first file

Comments:

in order to find out the number of rows, you could use stats (check help stats). With this gnuplot-only and platform-independent, unlike your n = system(sprintf('cat %s | wc -l', filedata))
row index starts at 0, e.g. every ::0::j. But since you have a headerline this line will not be plotted because it is text data.
there is the plotting style with labels. With this you can plot the value from column 1 somewhere as label, here at x,y,z ... u (7):(10):(10) ....

Data:

SO74583831_1.dat

t       x     y     z
 0      1.0   2.0   3.0
 0.15   2.0   5.0   4.0
 0.70   5.0   3.0   5.0
 3.78   7.0   7.0   6.0
 5.13   5.0   4.0   7.0
 7.45   3.0   4.0   8.0
10.99   1.0   1.0   9.0

SO74583831_2.dat

x     y     z
4.0   4.0   9.0
7.0   5.0   8.0
6.0   6.0   7.0
3.0   3.0   6.0
2.0   2.0   5.0
5.0   1.0   4.0
9.0   3.0   3.0

Script:

### plot two animated trajectories, 2nd file without time
reset session

FILE1 = "SO74583831_1.dat"
FILE2 = "SO74583831_2.dat"

stats FILE1 u 0 nooutput
N = STATS_records

set xrange[0:10]
set yrange[0:10]
set zrange[0:10]
set key noautotitle
set xyplane at 0

set terminal gif animate delay 60
set output "SO74583831.gif"

do for [j=0:N-1] {
    splot FILE1 u 2:3:4 every ::0::j w l lw 2 lc "red", \
             '' u 2:3:4 every ::j::j w p pt 7 ps 2 lc "red" ti "Particle 1", \
             '' u (7):(10):(10):(sprintf("Time: % 6.2f",$1)) every ::j::j with labels left, \
          FILE2 u 1:2:3 every ::0::j w l lw 2 lc "blue", \
             '' u 1:2:3 every ::j::j w p pt 7 ps 2 lc "blue" ti "Particle 2", \
}
set output
### end of script

Result: