Re: new to octave - need help with running user-defined function files

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Mar-2006, Theresa Bullard wrote:

| I installed using HPC and have loaded both gnuplot and Aquaterm. I also  
| enabled the octave-forge features by adding (as instructed by the HPC  
| sourceforge site) the following lines to my .octaverc files
| 
| LOADPATH =  
| ['/usr/local/libexec/octave/2.1.71/site/oct/powerpc-apple-darwin7.9.0/ 
| octave-forge:/usr/local/share/octave/2.1.71/site/m/octave-forge/ 
| /:',LOADPATH ];

You probably shouldn't be adding directories like this to LOADPATH.
They should already be in the DEFAULT_LOADPATH.  When you start
Octave, what is in DEFAULT_LOADPATH?  I'd guess it already has

  /usr/local/libexec/octave/2.1.71/site/oct/powerpc-apple-darwin7.9.0//

and

  /usr/local/share/octave/2.1.71/site/m//

In each of these, the trailing // tells Octave to search that
directory tree recursively, so adding a subdirectory of those
directories doesn't change anything.

Octave searches LOADPATH to find .m and .oct files.  The default value
for LOADPATH is ":", which tells Octave to search the
DEFAULT_LOADPATH.  If you store your files in ~/octave, put

  LOADPATH = "~/octave:"

in your ~/.octaverc file.  Then the trailing colon tells Octave to
append the directories listed in DEFAULT_LOADPATH, so the result is
that Octave looks in your directory first, then the system
directories.  If you want to search your files after the system files,
then put the colon first instead of last.

The same idea is used for EXEC_PATH.

All this is documented in the manual, in the section "Funtion Files".

jwe



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