disallowed characters in file names

[Quentin Spencer]

I was recently trying to get the octcdf toolbox in octave forge working 
properly with 2.9.5 (see the recent traffic on the octave-forge mailing 
list regarding this), and I found that the .oct file that contains most 
of the functions in the toolbox can't be found because it contains a '-' 
character in the file name. Here's an example:

$ locate ov-netcdf.oct
/usr/libexec/octave/site/oct/api-v18/i686-redhat-linux-gnu/octave-forge/ov-netcdf.oct
$ octave -q
octave:1>which("ov-netcdf");
which: `ov-netcdf' is undefined

At the same time, running the which command on any other file in that 
directory works. A file name with a '-' character is fairly common in 
Linux, but I can see why that particular character in a file name would 
be problematic for the octave parser. My question is, is this a bug or a 
feature?

-Quentin