octave : install fails

[Francesco Potorti`]

   After running the doinstall.sh procedure with prefix
   /home3/users/jefcor/OCTAVE, all directories are installed, but I
   cannot access any m-file, or 'man'info

I had the same problem.  I discovered that in the bin directory of the
octave tree there is an octave executable (shell script) that sets the
variable  OCTAVE_HOME.  Here is mine.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Wrapper for octave for binary installations that can't install
# octave in /usr/local/bin.
#
# The real binary should be installed in as octave.bin, and this file
# should be installed in the same directory as octave.

OCTAVE_HOME=/usr/users/pot/octave
export OCTAVE_HOME

exec $OCTAVE_HOME/bin/octave.bin $*