/tmp and Gnuplot

[Jerome Breitenbach]

Hi,

I'm new to this whole Cygwin + Octave thing (and am somewhat
of a UNIX neophyte).  Over the weekend, though, I successfully
installed and configured Cygwin B20 to my liking on Win98.
Also, I seem to have installed Octave 2.0.13 correctly from
the binaries, in that the program launches and can call
Gnuplot.  However, I have a problem with Octave communicating
to Gnuplot the path of the file to be plotted.  For example,
from Gnuplot I obtained
  gnuplot> pl "/tmp/oct-61061441.0" t "line 1"
              ^
           can't read data file "/tmp/oct-61061441.0"
           (No such file or directory)
even though the file /tmp/oct-61061441.0 existed (and Gnuplot
could indeed plot it when I guided it to it).  Apparently,
Gnuplot thinks that / is the same as C:\, which is not the case
in my configuration of Cygwin; rather, I mounted the bash root
/ at the DOS directory C:\cygnus\root, and thus the above file
is at
  C:\cygnus\root\tmp\oct-61061441.0
How do I (short of remounting / at C:\) get Octave to
communicate this properly to Gnuplot?

Thanks,
Jerome

P.S. A few comments about the installation:

* The instructions said to add "C:\octave\bin" to the path;
but, it appeared to me that the correct addition (from within
bash) is /octave/bin. Yes?

* The instructions said to set
  gnuplot_binary = "pipe-gnuplot /gnuplot/wgnuplot"
within octave, where "/gnuplot/wgnuplot" should be replaced
with the name of the gnuplot binary. After a few attempts,
I concluded that the forward slashes / here should instead
be backslashes \. Yes?

* During the installation--specifically, when the .m files
were being created--Windows complained that the installation
program had performed an "illegal operation". (The small
error-message window, as well as the Cygwin window, said
"Xargs" at the time.) Should I be concerned? Or, is there
something I should be doing to avoid this message?