Reading binary data.

[Randall M. Brannan]

I'm new to this list so please forgive me for asking a question which 
may have already been covered.  Can Octave read a binary data file?  
The 200 page Octave manual indicates that fread will read binary data 
but that the binary file must first be opened by fopen.  The problem 
is that the manual entry for fopen only allows text files.  I've tried 
playing with fopen and fread in various ways but fread always returns 
a count of zero.  I'm running on a SPARC-10 using the precompiled code 
I downloaded from:
ftp.che.utexas.edu:/pub/octave/BINARIES/sparc-sun-sunos4.1.2
  The manual also indicates you can simply give the filename to fread 
rather than the file-id returned from fopen.  I tried that and it still 
gave me count=zero.

                                        Thanks in advance,
                                        R. Brannan
                                        address@hidden