save and load bug.

[GARY FORBIS]

OK, it's been awhile since I've tried GNU Octave.  I'm running vista with octave-3.0.3.
It's much better than 3.0.1.  I'm back to learning the language by running an existing program.
It did a save in several places then loaded the files back in later.  Unfortunately they didn't load.
 
I used this unix command to help me track down the problem:
 
$ head -n 6 mnistvhclassify| cut -d\  -f-1000 >garytest2;tail -n 1 garytest2 | wc
      1     500   10420
 
and modified the number of rows and columns until it quit failing.
 
This one worked:
$ head -n 6 garytest2| cut -d\  -f-190 >garytest1;tail -n 1 garytest1 | wc
      1     189    3943
 
This one failed:
$ head -n 6 garytest2| cut -d\  -f-191 >garytest1;tail -n 1 garytest1 | wc
      1     190    3964
 
There's nothing interesting about the number of characters near these numbers so I wrotethis:
 
 a=0.0877672686001518
 b=[]
 for x=1:500
 b=[b,a]
 save stest b
 load stest
 end
 
and it worked all the way thru.
 
$ tail -n 1 stest | wc
      1     500    9502
 
so I took the last value in the file that failed, -0.03597396637549816, and reran the program and it fail with this size:

$ tail -n 1 stest | wc
      1     384    8066
 
The problem appears to have nothing to do with the number of characters in the row.
Then I counted the number of negative number:
 
$ tail -n 1 garytest1 | sed 's/[^-]//g' | wc
      1       1     191
 
but that's only half of the place where the simple program failed.
I don't get it.
 
Any ideas?
 
Thanks.