Octave 3.2.4 for windows: MSYS old / system path

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Oct-2010, Schirmacher, Rolf wrote:

| what I see on my Win XP system running 3.2.4 is that the path during
| system() calls is extended with leading octave directories including the
| standard unix tools in MSYS.
| While this is probably a good idea within a generic win environment, it
| results in issues in my environment as we have the GNU utilities installed
| in our default system configuration as well. 
| Unfortunately, some tools in the MSYS set seem to be quite old (e.g. sed),
| so I get compatibility issues with the generic GNU util installation (which
| e.g. batch files find first outside octave) and the old MSYS version (found
| from an octave system() call).
| 
| This results in 2 questions:
| 1) is it (easily) possible to change the path / environment for the system
| call to disable the added path?
| 2) is it (easily) possible to update the MSYS tools within the octave
| installation?

If you have newer/other tools installed that you would prefer to use
instead of the ones distributed with Octave, why not just delete the
ones from the Octave installation?

If you don't want to do that, you can modify the value of EXEC_PATH:

  octave> EXEC_PATH ("/what/ever:/you/want");

Put the call to EXEC_PATH in your ~/.octaverc file if you want that to
be changed for every session.

jwe